Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  But Grouse was not the only one to suffer from the Brute's lashes, for his master carried his ivory whip wherever he went. When a wasp settled on his wife's forehead during a carriage ride, he squashed it with the tip of this cane to ensure that it stung her face. In a temper he used to smash ornaments about the house or strike out against his children and servants. These acts were usually preceded by great beakers of Scotch whisky, gulped down in a hurry on his return from work.

  Arthur, who was born in August 1866, was the Brute's eldest child by four years. He had three sisters, Connie, Beatrice, or Trissie, and Elsie. Alick, his younger brother, was plucky and rebellious, and for that was the one most frequently whipped.

  Arthur, by comparison, was a lily-white boy, ‘pale and peaky’, as he described himself, besotted with his mother, scared of the organ in church, scared of twigs in the garden, scared of ghosts, scared of scissors, scared of lemonade. He suffered from asthma and was consequently no good at sport. The Brute's solution to his elder son's faiblesses was to enrol him on a toughen-you-up induction course based on the old-fashioned wisdom: ‘’Tis fear as makes ’em brave.’ To this end he forced his son to cling for his life to farm gates as he swung them violently back and forth, shouting, ‘Hold on, m'boy.’ He perched him on high branches, deserting him there for hours on end, and then would creep up behind him, blasting off both barrels of his gun just inches from his ear – all this to fortify Arthur's character and to teach him about surprises.

  Shooting and fishing were the Brute's keenest pleasures. Every year he shot partridge and pheasant near his home in Somerset and grouse in Scotland; he fished for trout on the Thames near Hungerford and for salmon at Lough Leane near Killarney in Ireland. These things he did with a relish that perennially lightened his outlook. ‘Those who knew him best,’ wrote Arthur, ‘will always remember him as most completely himself when the first of September had dawned with a cloudless sky, when the guns, cartridge bags and gamesticks were in the front of the dog-cart, bound to make merry with the coveys on Gallants Hill.’ They say he could have made a considerable fortune had he chosen advancement in the City instead of the fees of a country doctor, but his passions for shooting and fishing prevailed over his ambitions and, immediately after qualifying in London, he set up a practice in the mining village of Midsomer Norton, near Bath, close to his own West Country childhood home at Corsley. After he had inherited from his father – a strict and pointlessly patriarchal clergyman – the Brute took a lease of land from a local grandee on which to run his own shoot. The cupboards at Combe Florey are cluttered to this day with engraved plates, horn trophies and silver cups that testify to the Dead-eye Dickery of his aim.

  Arthur was good at shooting, too, but he disliked it, and this was a sore disappointment to his father. Dog-whipping and sudden explosions by the earhole had done nothing to sharpen his boy's enthusiasm for the sport, so the Brute tried another ploy to arouse his interest. Every night for a week he dragged Arthur out of bed and pushed him into the damp gloom of a downstairs cupboard where, shivering in his pyjamas and doubtless crying like a baby, he was ordered to kiss his father's gun-case. This didn't seem to work either. Of the Brute's three daughters Trissie was his favourite. She knew how to please her father by taking a lively interest in all of his hobbies. She was a plainish but intelligent girl, well informed about hunting, fishing and horticulture, on which matters she regaled the whiskery one in false, cute tones that found favour with him but aggravated her siblings. When Arthur was sixteen, he composed a little ode to Trissie, illumined by a pen-and-ink drawing of a small book, ironically entitled The Wise Sayings of My Pet Daughter by Alexander Waugh. Arthur's doggerel runs thus:

  Her voice is like the sound of silver bells

  And endless comfort to her father tells

  The rest are all despised, rejected quite,

  The gentle Beatrice puts them out of sight.

  No music half so sweetly to him sounds,

  As her ‘Yoicks’ ‘Tally Ho!’ that casts the hounds,

  For he has found in one of tender age

  The sportsman, gardener, expert and sage

  Neither Trissie (the plain one), Connie (the bitchy one), nor Elsie (the hysteric) ever made it to the altar. After their parents’ deaths all three continued to occupy the old house at Midsomer Norton, surviving off small dividends of a stake in a Welsh colliery that had belonged to their mother. For fifty years they gave Bible instruction classes to the villagers. ‘So far as there can be any certainty in a question which so often reveals surprising anomalies,’ Evelyn wrote in 1963,‘I can assert that my aunts were maidens.’ When he saw Connie, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, he supposed that a life of chastity had rendered her insane: ‘I was surprised on seeing her again to find she is every bit as crazy as my Raban relatives. I think that perhaps it is virginity which makes elderly women mad when they suddenly realise that it is too late to hope for beastly pleasures.’

  I suspect some, if not all, of these maiden aunts to have been put off men for life by the indecent interferences of their brutish father, but since I cannot lay my hands on a single shred of testimony to support this theory, I suppose I had better not elaborate upon it here.

  When Elsie, the last remaining, died in 1952, Evelyn plotted to buy the house and convert its elegant reception rooms into an Evelyn Waugh museum exhibiting souvenirs of his life and literary achievement. He wrote to his wife (my grandmother) suggesting the scheme, but she ignored it, and continued to ignore it until his enthusiasm fizzled out.

  The house at Midsomer Norton was small but its elegant, symmetrical front concealed a tangle of unsuspected corridors and incongruous levels behind. The gardens were extensive. An impressive array of stables and outbuildings enclosed a courtyard at the back, which captivated Evelyn's imagination during the long summer holidays of his childhood. He remembered especially the library, full of arresting specimens in glass jars that the Brute had collected during his student days. (What happened to these? I wonder.) He particularly coveted a phial containing the ‘White Blood’ of a patient who had died from an exalted form of anaemia in the late 1860s. As a small boy he noticed that the blood had already turned a brownish yellow and congealed. ‘When, after the death of the last of my aunts, I came to superintend the disposal of their property,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I sought vainly for this delight of my childhood.’

  There was also a monkey, brought from Africa by a great-uncle, that collapsed from sunstroke while being exhibited to a party of schoolchildren in the rectory garden at Corsley and was immortalised with a hideous desiccated grimace by a taxidermist from Frome. For many years it was suspended in a glass box above the bath, whence it glowered through a steamy glaze at Evelyn and Alec as they washed their bottoms in the tub below. (I wonder what became of that too.) Elsie, Evelyn's favourite aunt, made a point of identifying those objects in the house that her relations wanted and spitefully offering them (even though they were not legally hers) to third parties, who neither cared for, nor wanted them.

  Much of the contents of the house was disposed of in this way. Elsie, a sharp, selfish soi-disante invalid, used, as an old lady, to spend her days decked in heavy Victorian jewellery, counting her possessions in languid recline on a chaise-longue. There she awaited her eldest sister's deliveries of tea, sandwiches and cake, nicely laid out on a silver tray. ‘I try not to feel bitter when I see Connie, much older than me and able to go everywhere and do everything,’ she said.

  The house at Midsomer Norton is now an office, surrounded by Tarmac, full of people at desks pulling important faces with computers. Within twenty feet of the front porch, where once there was a rose garden, now stands a colossal telecommunications centre in brown-stained concrete with Vitrolite windows, surrounded on three sides by a parking area for two hundred cars. The orchard, where Arthur, Connie, Trissie, Elsie and Alick used to play cricket in their quaint Victorian clothes, is now the site of an orange-roofed bungalow development, e
ach house with flat plate windows and a meanly individuated front lawn. The Brute's conservatory has been pulled down; the apricot tree that poisoned the donkey with a surfeit of its unripe fruit is no longer in evidence. The stables, where every holiday Evelyn carved his name on the rafters, have been split into three modern, American-style condos. The traffic roar is incessant and deafening. In the cemetery, across the way, the Brute's high stone-carved Celtic memorial has not weathered well. The script on the plinth beneath is now barely decipherable and a few yards away, where Connie and Elsie are interred together, the stone cross that once marked their spot has long since smashed on to the grave beneath and buried itself in a thick mound of ivy. At the town's best pub I was served a rotten lunch. Midsomer Norton is a horrid place now – tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse.

  Arthur Waugh's wife, my great-grandmother, detested her father-in-law. Years after his death she would shudder at the memory of his bad and his good moods alike. ‘A very common little man’, she called him – and, if it had not been she who coined the sobriquet ‘Brute’, it was certainly through her that most of the evil stories about him circulated. She remembered sourly how, during her long engagement to Arthur, he exploded with rage when he found them playing piquet with a pack of cards that he had especially reserved for whist. ‘They will not work for whist now you have used them for piquet!’ he yelled. ‘You have disempowered them.’ She also took mortal offence when, on the only occasion that the Brute came to stay with her and Arthur in London, he left prematurely, complaining that ‘a week of your son and your dog would render me insane’.

  Arthur, on the other hand, juggled a mixture of emotions towards his father. He felt loyalty and admiration at some times, and resentment, bitterness and fear at others. From his tenderest years he had been brainwashed by the culture of the Victorian paterfamilias. That his father was important and to be respected, whether he liked him or not, was an intrinsic creed that Arthur could never shake off. Like so many sons, he spent too much of his time in search of paternal approval. He knew that the best way to the Brute's heart would be to follow Trissie's example – to take a pleasure in, or to show enthusiasm for, those things that excited his father, but this was not easy. In politics, the Brute was boorish and verbose: as chairman of the Taunton Conservatives’ Association his bullish Tory opinions were not to be gainsaid. In 1889 he threatened to withdraw his medical services from anyone at Midsomer Norton who failed to vote for his preferred candidate in the local council elections, and when the scandal was gaining circulation around the village he threatened to sue anyone who repeated it. A case of slander was eventually brought against a Mr George Carter and dramatically lost. Arthur worked for his father, liaising with solicitors during the case. It was a bad time for their relationship.

  Because of Arthur's asthma, his mother, a natural panicker, had extracted a promise from his school that he would not be made to take strenuous exercise. He was banned from the school football and running teams because of this. He was bored by fishing, hated shooting and had no stomach whatever for the medical profession. Indeed, Arthur and the Brute shared very few passions, but there were at least two: cricket and amateur theatricals.

  Cricket is a good outdoor game for asthmatics as it requires little by way of physical commitment at the amateur level. Even so, Arthur was never much good at it. He played for a club at Midsomer Norton that was founded and presided over by his father. Typically he was kept out at twelfth man or put in as umpire. Only occasionally was he allowed to bat. On none of the surviving score sheets is he registered as notching any more than ten runs.3 His sisters, all keen players for the women's team, were better at batting than he was, but in spite of this minor humiliation Arthur remained a fanatical enthusiast of the game all his life.

  Trips with the Brute to see England play at Lord's or at the Oval in London ranked high among the happy memories of his childhood. Most thrilling of all was his first sighting of W G. Grace, by far the greatest batsman of his age, in a match between Gloucestershire and Australia at Clifton College one sweltering day in August 1882. W. G. was at the height of his fame. Forty-five years later, in an introduction to a book of cricketing stories, Arthur recalled the happy moment: ‘He is coming! He is coming! And he is seeing the ball as big as a balloon. Oh, that first sight of WG. in his red and yellow cap, his big beard flowing over his chest, his foot cocked upwards like a signal! Fortunate boy, to see him make 77, the very first time.’ On the train home Arthur and the Brute shared their indignation at the way W.G. had been given out: ‘Of course he wasn't out!’W.G.'s remarkable career continued for another twenty-six years, ending in 1908 with 126 centuries, 54,896 runs and 2876 wickets.

  Throughout his adult life Arthur used to say: ‘With a thorough knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare and Wisden's Cricketing Almanac you cannot go far wrong.’ Even in contemplation of death he was able to console himself with the hope that some of his body's atoms might eventually find their way, wafted by a favouring gale, on to the playing-field at Lord's. This idea he expressed in a staggeringly fatuous article in 1927:

  Why should we fear the gentle arms of Mother Earth, with her comfortable bed beneath the greensward of our game? She is very tender with her children, and folds them closely to her heart. The wind, too, blows whither it listeth; and who knows where it may waft our own poor dust in the days that are to be? It may even carry some of it across the field at Lord's, scattering its particles by the well-worn wicket, in the very thick of the fight. Then in the sunlight we shall surely wake to remember many things; and in the darkness we shall not forget.

  The Brute's obsession with amateur dramatics was, I believe, inextricably connected with his personal need to show off. His egocentricity was a phenomenal force. Although he was regarded as a jovial cove – indeed, as a rounded and popular pillar of local society – his returns home after work were awaited in a mood of apprehension by his servants and family. As he entered the hall he would stamp his feet on the marble floor. If concerned faces did not instantly pop up from all around to greet him, he clamoured and bellowed some more until everyone in the house had dropped what he or she was doing and rushed to ask him how his day had passed.

  His good moods were no less oppressive. When happy the Brute was facetious, sentimental, patronising, demonstrative and overbearing. He liked to be at the centre of attention and believed (because people were too afraid to signal to him otherwise) that he was a great wit. By today's honed standards, his humour would be thought clumsy: it relied heavily on exaggeration – mock-wailing, false, rollicking laughter, theatrical rages, lofty musings with eyes closed and hands outstretched to the heavens. All his life he made an art out of hamming. The Brute performed so often that he eventually lost touch with whatever real self was originally within him. He was only ever able to act. Like Mrs Cheveley in Wilde's An Ideal Husband, he found being natural ‘such a very difficult pose to keep up’. And, indeed, it is, but neither the Brute nor Arthur (who was similarly inclined) was able to sustain a natural pose for a single minute. To both of them ‘fatherhood’ was synonymous with ‘theatrical opportunity’ – a go-ahead to strut and fret, to spout quotations, and fill the air with noisome and ridiculous voices. ‘Be'ave, Geaarge, be'ave!’ the Brute used to bellow in an assumed Somerset accent to each and any of his children at table.

  Mealtimes were ritualistic. The Brute sat always at the head on a carved oak armchair that nobody else was allowed to use, even when he was not in the room. Before supper, when his blood-sugar levels were at their lowest, he would bellow to the servants to speed things up and, as he sat down, regardless of what food was being served, could be heard to holler:

  Puddin’! Puddin’! Puddin’!

  Gi’ me plenty o'puddin’,

  So pass me plate,

  And don't be late,

  And pile it up wi'puddin’.

  Polite laughter was expected.

  Children were permitted to dine with their parents from the age of ten. At the end of
dinner, those who had not left the room in tears were expected to rise, tuck their chair under the table and bob to each of their parents in turn: ‘Love to Mother, compliments to Father,’ then leave the room quietly.

  Theatricality has proved itself the besetting sin of the fathers in my family for at least six generations. The Reverend James Waugh, rector of Corsley (the Brute's father), always acted the part of a trembling old prophet even when he was young and fit. ‘Of course every man has a touch of the actor about him,’ said Arthur. ‘We all like to imagine ourselves in heroic attitudes. Even if we are too sensitive to set our fancies free when we are awake, what devils of fellows some of us are, to be sure, in our dreams.’

  Evelyn likewise looked upon the duties and responsibilities of fatherhood as an actor might look upon his craft. As he revealed in the excoriating self-portrait The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

  [Pinfold a.k.a. Evelyn Waugh] without design, gradually assumed the character of burlesque. He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier but the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, until it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind

  and the other half swelled to take its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass.

  Evelyn was more self-critical than his father and grandfather, neither of whom appeared to notice the masks they were wearing or to register the effect of them on others. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising that Arthur and the Brute should have been most at their ease together when indulging in their passion for amateur dramatics. As a boy Arthur wrote hundreds of short plays, many in verse and many with a principal part for a tyrannical ogre that suited the Brute. These were performed at home or in the nearby community hall. Together, father and son joined a local society for amateur thespians and continued to act until the year of the Brute's death when they starred alongside one another in Sydney Grundy's A Pair of Spectacles, the Brute as Uncle Gregory, a shady con from Sheffield, and Arthur as his soft-hearted, easily deceived younger brother, Benjamin Goldfinch.