I spent many absorbed hours with her in this occupation and on good days when they escaped through holes in the wire I was allowed to chase them through the woods, waving laurel branches and shouting, ‘Get ye o'er ther, yer girt flummins.’ I always spoke to cows in a Somerset accent. In the evenings I brought my toy plastic cows round to the Wing and spread them out across Granny's kitchen table. With these she taught me the tricks and techniques of the cattle trade: herding, milking, curing, sexing, how to put a ring in a bull's nose without enraging it. I soon became as obsessed as she. Perhaps I flatter myself in supposing that my indefatigable willingness to join with her in endless bovine conversation elevated me in her heart to the honoured position vacated by the deaths of Sanders and, more recently, of her gardener at Combe Florey, Walter Coggins. My father had murdered him – or so Granny always claimed – to avenge his cruel treatment of Grandpapa's peacocks. The first time she accused Papa of killing Coggins was during a quiet moment at Evelyn's funeral. The gardener had disappeared at the time of Evelyn's death. ‘I know where you've hidden the body,’ she hissed at him; but a week later Coggins reappeared at the kitchen door stinking of alcohol. He had been on a blinder.
On the night of 16 June 1973 Granny came to supper and left the table early, saying she was feeling unwell. I was sitting at the far end nearest the door to the Wing, and as she passed I looked at her white, anxious face and thought to myself: She is going to die tonight.
Next morning I came down to breakfast to find my father on the telephone in tears. It was the first and last time I saw him cry. She had died of pneumonia in the night.
I cannot easily explain how Granny, who was so strangely detached from the world and all the people in it, came to be loved so passionately by those who knew her – but that was how it was. Anthony Powell described her as ‘extremely dim to put it mildly’, but he hardly knew her and his reckoning was erroneous. She was clever in many ways – much cleverer in some than Powell. I am sure she could have completed The Times crossword in the time it took him to digest the first clue, but she was no show-off. Papa believed her to have been more remarkable than his father, and felt her death more deeply than his. Her humour was warm and her personality gentle. She was companionable. I particularly liked the smell that attached to all her jerseys – sherry, French cigarettes and dog baskets all blended into one, a lovely Granny fragrance.
Combe Florey House, as I first remember it, was a shambling fortress of creaky stairs and alien smells. Chief among its attractions – at any rate to a seven-year-old boy – were a life-sized carved wooden lion in the hall; Victorian painted furniture by William Burges; a stuffed white owl whose wing I could remove by lifting the glass dome that covered it and yanking; a wooden bagatelle board; cattle grids; delicious Guernsey cream; a crystal chandelier that tinkled when you punched it; a ferocious gander called Captain, whose attacks we fended off with umbrellas; incomplete sets of cards, sherbet fountains, bottles of ink. In the years after Evelyn's death Granny put the house on the market but when prospective buyers came round she poured buckets of water through the floorboards and ordered her dog, Credit, to shit on the carpets and pee against the curtains. If anyone was brazen enough to put in an offer after that, she declined it.
The library, when we arrived, was empty. Every shelf, desk, sheaf of paper, even the pens and the wastepaper baskets, all Grandpapa's books, his bound manuscripts, diaries and precious collections of Victorian chromo-lithography, his first editions, second editions, inscribed editions, books by his father, books by his brother, carpets, paintings and carved animals – the whole lot was sold in 1968 to an opportunist in a Stetson called Harry Ransom on behalf of the University of Texas. Ransom's original concept was to set up, brick for brick, shelf for shelf, the Evelyn Waugh Library at Austin, but my father died in the belief that once the deal had been struck and everything transported to Texas, Ransom had never got round to unpacking the crates. This may be true. Papa's attempt to swap some of the Texan plunder, in particular the furniture and pictures, for four thousand items of Evelyn's incoming correspondence came to nothing.
At Combe Florey Granny made no attempt to reconvert the gutted room to better use. It just lay at the front of the house, vast and derelict. By dismantling the library she had effectively extinguished the spirit of Evelyn's personality from Combe Florey. It was as though the heart of the house had been plucked from it – is that what she really wanted to do? My father and his sister Meg believed that she sold the library in contumeliam puerorum – or, to put it in plain English, to annoy her children. If that had indeed been her aim, she certainly succeeded in it. Evelyn had left her plenty of money but, in the hands of a perverse solicitor who dripped it to her in tiny increments, she was constructively encouraged in delusions of poverty. The deal with Texas – $8500 for the whole lot – included items that were not even part of the library: a marble bust of Evelyn by Paravicini that was in the dining room, two seventeenth-century globes that stood in the hall. Grandpapa had spent far more than $8500 accumulating his books alone. I don't understand how Granny came to be so ill-advised. I don't know what she thought she was doing.
For a quiet lady who hated the public gaze she surprised all who knew her in the short interval between her husband's death and her own, by letting off two wreaking petards. The library sale was the first; the publication of Evelyn's diaries the second. She had not even read them before she sold the rights to the Observer; neither did she consult any of her children. My father later wrote: ‘Like many of the upper class she had a hatred of publicity, but also a passion for selling things. Any crooked timber merchant who came to the door could persuade her to sell him an avenue of mature oaks for £15 a tree.’
When the diaries started to appear in lurid weekly instalments she regretted what she had done, hoping that the fuller version, in book form – which she did not live to see – might, one day, repair some of the damage. To those who had already formed the view that Evelyn was a callous snob, the diaries confirmed their prejudice. For some reason people thought he should have paraded his virtues in his diaries and have ever since held it against him for not doing so.
It is debatable that Evelyn intended them to be published. He left no instructions, and some of his children took the view that their publication was a betrayal of his memory. My father was not among them. ‘The main thrill in keeping a diary,’ he wrote, ‘lies in the secret hope that it will be published one day and astound the world. I see it as a sort of private exhibitionism like that of a woman who locks herself in her bedroom alone and takes all her clothes off, imagining that 100,000 people are feasting their eyes on the spectacle.’ He did not mind in the least about all the rude references to himself. If anything he agreed with his father's assessment. Reviewing the diaries for the Spectator in 1976, he conceded that ‘growing children are seldom very elegant, amusing or smart and I think it was this vulgarity that my father resented most’.
Papa sympathised with Evelyn because I think he also found children a little vulgar, his own included. At times he resented our sloppy speech, our gross appetites for junk food, sweets, plastic toys and baggy clothes. Most of all, he hated the sight of us in gym shoes, but while his father would have ordered him from the room with cries of ‘Out!’ – Papa's method was to block his nose, pull an imaginary lavatory chain and a disgusted face, and leave it at that. In Cakes and Ale William Somerset Maugham, meditating on the tribulations of a writer's life, concludes: ‘But a writer has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.’ Having liberated myself from the obstinate problems of time, God, and now fathers and sons, I can wholeheartedly agree with Maugham's point and am sure my father would have felt the same. He, too, used his writing to free himself from the irritations of life and the problems of human existence:
Y
oung people wear sneakers, trainers and other forms of tennis shoe all day long. These are always rubber soled and often with a top of some synthetic material which makes the feet sweat and smell and grow fungus. When one thinks how strict the health fanatics are about every form of food, drink and cigar, pipe or cigarette, you would think they would show some concern about these pools of sickness and infection at the bottom of everyone's legs. It may take a year or two for the baneful effects of this footwear to be noticed – nearly four centuries elapsed between the introduction of tobacco by Sir Walter Raleigh and the setting up of ASH, the organisation of anti-smoking hysterics – but I would not be surprised if most of those smelly feet eventually had to come off.
By the time we moved to Combe Florey in 1971 the name Auberon Waugh was quite well known among intelligent, educated English folk. Five years later it was a household name throughout the land. His fantasy diary published in the fortnightly satirical magazine Private Eye attracted a cult following, and in 1976 a television series in which he excoriated the working class attracted equal amounts of adulation and opprobrium in Britain and beyond. The unpredictable Libyan head of state, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi astounded his people by claiming that Auberon Waugh was his favourite author, while the Queen of Holland told her courtiers that she subscribed to the magazine Books and Bookmen only to keep up with the wit Auberon Waugh.
In late September 1976 while she was absorbing herself in the latest edition Papa was watching television in the kitchen at Combe Florey. He rarely switched it on but when he did it was always for the pleasure of laughing at pompous, self-important people. That evening he was confronted by a tanned, meaty face with a heartthrob Australian accent. The programme seemed pretty dull to me – another earnest world-affairs round-up seen from a slightly whining, socialist perspective – but my father thought it extremely funny and could not contain his merriment. The presenter was called John Pilger. In his diary Papa noted:
Something about the bottomless stupidity and deviousness of Pilger's face had me in stitches even before the extraordinary announcement at the end that the views expressed had been Mr Pilger's own. This idea that Pilger himself thought up all those kindergarten opinions put me in such paroxysms as might easily have been mistaken for the last stages of rabies. It was at that point that someone wisely telephoned for an ambulance.
I remember the incident well: wonderful to see him so happy; horrid to see him so ill. Papa never forgave Pilger: the hearty laughter he had provoked somehow disturbed the delicate equipoise of the old Cyprus wounds in Papa's back and chest. For six weeks he hovered between life and death at the Westminster Hospital. Those who had not seen the funny side of his anti-working-class broadcasts clapped their hands with glee. My mother rushed up to London, leaving her children at Combe Florey to fatten themselves on a rich diet of melted Mars Bar and vanilla ice-cream, served daily by an indulgent aunt. From my bedroom I wrote to Papa with the news of ten separate village sex scandals that I thought would amuse him. My letter ended: ‘I hope you are feeling better. I think you are extremely nice and I know lots of people who have seen your television programmes on the television and they all said that you were very good and interesting.’
This was not quite true. In fact, I remember people telling me that my father was a shit because of his ‘radical’ views. Over the years I got used to it. If they weren't brave enough to say so outright they simply asked, with a slippery smirk, ‘So, what's it like being the son of Auberon Waugh, then?’ People have walked away from me at parties as soon as they learned who my father was, and I was once head-butted by a violent oaf in Manchester wishing to protest against one of Papa's recent pieces. Blood streamed from my face as I crouched on the floor and the maniac tried to kick my head off. Eventually he was pulled away, shrieking and cursing, ‘Your fucking dad's a fucking tosser.’ On a separate occasion I was grabbed by the neck and shoved against a wall by the son of a Labour MP who thought that by throttling me he might rid the world of some minor aspect of the Auberon Waugh canker.
My father's articles made humourless and pompous people shake with uncontrollable rage. In 1985 Private Eye pretended to sack him. A flood of letters came in protesting that the magazine without the ‘comic genius’ of ‘this latter day Samuel Pepys’ was not worth reading. At the end of the column the editor wrote: ‘As a result of the above letters Mr Waugh has been re-engaged.’ In the next issue furious enemies wailed their resentment of the ‘balding vulgar little egotist’, ‘this slimy lower class rat, this stammering old hooray henry, this perpetually wanking rotten gritter and ubiquitous AIDS carrier’.
John Pilger, I have learned from one of his friends, was so terrified of my father that he used to blanch at the sound of his name. Papa never seemed to care how many people appeared to hate him. It amused him to be insulted just as it embarrassed him to be praised. He did nothing to court popularity: ‘Anyone who applies the concept of popular approval to any aspect of his life's philosophy or behaviour is building his house upon a pile of shit,’ he used to teach me.
When people met my father for the first time they invariably came to the same conclusion: ‘Isn't it odd that this rude, abrasive and opinionated journalist should be such a mild-mannered, diffident and pleasant man? He must have a split personality.’ I never saw it like this. Knowing the man first, I can only perceive his articles as having been written in the same benign, liberal and humane tone as that with which he presented his observations in private. I have never understood why people thought his writing cruel, malicious or offensive. It was mischievous certainly, often teasing, often outraged, always clever and always funny, and beneath everything he wrote, behind the hot words and bandied rebukes, there always throbbed, as far as I could tell, the steady beat of a warm heart.
People were terrified of meeting my father. They imagined him to be sharp, aggressive and impatient of other people's opinions, but he was none of these things. I only once ever saw him be rude to anybody – a whining American lady with blue-rinse hair in the Doge's Palace, Venice, who abused him for walking the wrong way down a thin passage between galleries. I was twelve, standing right behind him when the argument began. ‘Go away you ugly old tart,’ I heard him say to her – what a hero he was to me that day.
In October 1977 he received, out of the blue, a letter from Lionel Grigson – son of the famous poet Geoffrey Grigson – complaining that he had read in the Guardian Diary that Papa was among the signatories to a letter attacking the Catholic Institute of International Relations for its ‘alleged pro-guerrilla stance’ in Rhodesia. ‘Your views are becoming more and more odious every day. You seem to be turning into a grotesque parody of your father,’ Grigson wrote, ending his letter: ‘I've noticed a similar pro-Rhodesia tendency in other things of yours. I would like to have thought that you were at least a pleasant person to know, but you have finally convinced me that this cannot be so. Yours coldly, Lionel Grigson.’
Papa was, as I say, a very polite person, but when kicked, he liked to kick back and, as a self-proclaimed ‘master of the vituperative arts’, invariably came out on top. His reply to Lionel Grigson's assault is a good example:
Dear Mr Grigson,
How queer that I have no recollection of signing any letter about Rhodesia and think it most unlikely that I did so, but as I have not seen the piece in the Guardian Diary to which you refer, I do not really know what you are talking about. I seem to remember signing a letter complaining about the impertinence of the Catholic Institute of International Relations in presuming to speak for the Catholic Church. I should also suppose that only a moral cretin would support terrorist activities in Rhodesia, however just their aims. But I have never written on the subject of Rhodesia, despite writing three articles a week on current affairs for the last ten years, for the good reason that, unlike you, I have never been able to decide the exact rights and wrongs of the situation there. So when you say you have noticed a pro-Rhodesia tendency in my writing, you are talking rubbish.
You are right when you suggest that whatever gratitude I may owe to your father for his devotion to English literature over the last 50 years does not extend to his son, of whom I have never heard until this moment. I would write in stronger terms except that I suspect you may be mad, when you write these pompous, twerpish letters to complete strangers and sign them ‘Yours coldly’. So I will end with a cordial invitation to piss off, or as the Americans say, go fuck yourself.
Yours sincerely, Auberon Waugh
Papa never took much interest in my education, resigning himself early to the disquieting truth that I had only two solid talents, both of them ‘soft options’: art and music. He was not a discerning critic of either. I think he liked oil paintings of animals and I know he adored Gilbert and Sullivan and traditional church hymns. He used to sing a lot – ‘When I Am King of the Boeotians’, ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’, ‘Lily the Pink’, ‘She Was Poor But She Was Honest’, ‘Chi del gitano I giorni abbella – he sang them all with reckless disregard for the rules of rhythm and pitch, but always with gusto as he crossed the hall from the library to the kitchen. Since he died I cannot hear these songs without feeling tearful.
I am grateful that he did not ram religion down my throat in the way that he had had it rammed down his by Grandpapa. We were not sent to Catholic schools; nor were we given prayer books and religious bric-à-brac for Christmas. For a while he drove his children dutifully to Catholic Mass in Taunton. My mother, an Anglican of sorts, did not come with us and we sat in the back seat of the car chanting noisily ‘Boo to Churchy! Boo to Churchy!’ I like to think that it was this act of rebellion that eventually persuaded him to discontinue our Sunday trips to St George's, but in his autobiography Papa gave an alternative explanation:
Fathers and Sons Page 46