Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  Evelyn and Laura did not succeed in buying the manor at Nunney, as Evelyn had predicted. Instead they settled for a beautiful Tudor house with an elegant eighteenth-century façade, surrounded by parkland and mature trees, 120 miles west of London. Piers Court lay just outside the village of Stinchcombe, near Dursley in the Cotswolds. The Waughs called it ‘Stinkers’. At last Evelyn was free of his father's house and his first years of marriage were consequently years of great happiness: a period of joy in a life that was otherwise clouded by depression and turmoil. He enjoyed decorating the house, designing shelves for his library, follies for the garden, filling the place with fine books, beautiful furniture and pictures. He had a remarkable eye for objets d'art and keenly collected Victorian paintings at a time when they were unprized and inexpensive. He bought Rossetti's Spirit of the Rainbow (a full-length charcoal nude), now in the Andrew Lloyd Webber collection. He bought a notable Arthur Hughes, The Woodman, and a striking narrative painting by George Smith, Out Into the Cold World, which depicts a beautiful bankrupted lady and her child being turfed out of their home following the death of her husband. In the fields surrounding the house Laura kept four dairy cows that to her were a source of inordinate pleasure.

  The outlying cottages at Piers Court were filled with servants; others walked every day from the village. Many were from the Attwood family. There was Norman Attwood, the cowman and his sister Mrs Harper, who along with Gladys Attwood and Mrs Attwood, their mother, was supposed to do the cleaning but spent most of the morning squabbling with her family over cooked breakfast in the kitchen. The first cook was a refugee from Austria, Frau Müller, who made veal schnitzels until war broke out when she hid under a bed at Pixton in daily expectation of a summons from the Fatherland. Mr Ellwood was an efficient, Jeeves-style butler, imported from St John's Wood in London.

  Arthur came to Piers Court only twice. The first of his visits (a year after Evelyn and Laura had moved in) took place towards the end of July 1938. By the time of his second visit, in August 1939, Evelyn and Laura had had their first child, a playful kitten of a girl called Teresa. Both visits were a success. Evelyn was at his warmest, friendliest and best disposed. He, Arthur, Laura and K spent the weekend dandling Teresa, playing chess, driving round country lanes, eating good food, sipping expensive wines and poring over The Times crossword puzzle. Arthur marvelled at Evelyn's good fortune, was delighted with the house and awed by Evelyn's wonderful collection of books. It must have been odd for him that both his sons, coming from a modest middle-class Hampstead background, were now set up in formidable English country houses surrounded by parkland and filled with servants. I suppose he was a little jealous.

  Despite the success of his two visits Arthur was still no closer to understanding Laura. ‘I must confess I cannot fathom Laura a bit,’ he wrote to Joan. ‘I don't know whether she has a very strong character, and is able to keep all her feelings to herself; or whether she is a case of arrested development soothed by the Papal dope. The only things I have ever discussed with her are cross-word puzzles and the question of whether Ellwood is actually married to Mrs Ellwood! Which does not get us very far along the beaten path of confidence!’ His thank-you letter to Laura after his second visit took the form of a rhapsody in verse:

  How, Laura, can I hope in verse

  (For none has ever written worse)

  To hymn the joys of countless sort

  That greet the guests at Piers Court?

  I might essay it, if I could With Auden vie and Isherwood;

  I might, had I Rossetti's bloom,

  Revive the rainbow in your room;

  Or pass that snowy portal with

  The widow of the painter Smith, But, being a deaf Victorian bore,

  Such heights are not for Arthur Waugh.

  So let me rather sit and muse

  On memories I shall never lose:

  Of Evelyn's kindness, Laura's grace,

  And all the witchery of the place,

  Of Cotswold stone, and English lawns,

  Of swooping knights and captive pawns,

  Of lightning turns round tortuous lanes,

  Of Tudor casements, Stuart vanes.

  Unravelled clues myself have missed

  (You champion crux-verbalist!),

  Our host's illimitable wit,

  (Heaven knows how much I envy it!)

  And over all, urbane and free,

  Your matchless hospitality.

  O for another beaker blest

  With that ripe nectar of the West!

  O for the meals Frau Müller cooks;

  O for a month with Evelyn's books;

  for the gentle evening hush;0

  The thoroughness of Ellwood's brush;

  And sweet Teresa's plaintive moan,

  ‘Mama is gone! Papa is gone!’

  ME she will never miss – not she!

  But I miss HER tremendously.

  Dear Laura, for these golden days

  Accept our gratitude and praise:

  And if the Führer, blatant, blear,

  Should spare us for another year,

  And Peace return, on earth to reign,

  pray we may come back again.

  Arthur Waugh

  August xxiii: 1939

  As we all know, the Führer did not ‘spare us for another year’. Within nine days of the poem's conception he and his goose-stepping cohorts had rolled their tanks into Poland. Two days after that London and Paris had declared war on Germany. Within a month Evelyn and Laura, round wombed with a second child, had left Piers Court for Pixton where, on the top floor, twenty evacuee children from the Midlands had been billeted. Their precious belongings were boxed up in the cellar. On 26 September a gaggle (if that is the right collective term) of Catholic nuns arrived at Piers Court to run it as a convent school for the duration of hostilities. For Evelyn and Laura the brief idyll was ended and the world was once again at war.

  As a trained soldier in the Regular Army Reserve Alec was given immediate instructions by the War Office to report in uniform to barracks in Dorchester. Evelyn, by contrast, found it harder to get into the army. He was a brave man, excited by danger, always craving new experience, desperate to fight, and to avoid the tedium of a desk job in army intelligence, but as a thirty-six-year-old novelist, untrained in soldiering except for a few terms in the Lancing College OTC, he was not the obvious first choice for regimental colonels. Despite his good contacts, both Naval Intelligence and the Welsh Guards turned him down. I do not doubt that in the back of his mind lay memories of the little aura of importance that Alec enjoyed during the First World War and when he told his father of his efforts to enlist as an active soldier, he was disappointed that Arthur proved ‘markedly unsympathetic to my project of joining the war’.

  From that moment Evelyn resolved to tell his father nothing but the barest minimum about his movements. It was a plan calculated to agitate Arthur, but he believed there was no point in ‘going through the motions’. He sensed that Arthur's interest in his war was dutiful and unsympathetic: all he really cared about was Alec. When Arthur asked Evelyn to let him know what he was doing he responded: ‘But why? It is merely your idle curiosity!’ There was no peace between them. Every time they met Evelyn upset his father. Sometimes, when he felt he had gone too far, he sent round a crate of Pommard in half bottles by way of apology, but the relationship did not improve. Arthur's heart remained with Alec, to whom he wrote in September 1939:

  Your cheerful letter, which arrived at mid-day, has done me more good than a half bottle of Pommard. I am so thankful that you are happy. What does income tax matter

  compared with that? And if you get a comparatively safe job my spirits will not crack. My war is your war, ‘because man's heart is small’.

  Two months later, after the intervention of two MPs, Winston Churchill and Brendan Bracken, Evelyn was offered a commission in the Marines. A week earlier his son Auberon, my father, had been born at Pixton.

  While Alec
was stationed in Dorchester he met and fell in love with a six foot two giantess whose large bosoms bounced about on a level with his eyes when they danced together. Her father was Admiral Sir Arthur Duff, himself a titchy man but a formidable presence in Dorset society, and his daughter Joan was attracted to the diminutive male especially if he showed no awkwardness when they danced. Alec danced unselfconsciously with his face buried in her chest. He loved her black wavy hair, her blue eyes, her strong hairy arms and her deep basso voice. Oh yes, her voice! ‘Talking to her on the telephone was a date,’ he used to say. Dorset-Joan was given free run of Alec's bachelor flat in London for a modest pound a week. Between army duties in Dorchester and visits to his new, heffa lump mistress there was no time for Alec to see the children or his wife, the other Joan, at Edrington.

  When, at length, he was posted to Arras, Arthur and K went to the station to see him off. It was the same platform from which they had waved goodbye on that chill morning in 1917. Again the scene was emotional. K thought Alec looked splendidly youthful in his uniform, but Arthur only gazed upon his son's bald pate and sighed, ‘The years pile on now.’

  The train stopped for a few minutes at Basingstoke where Joan and the children had been asked to wait on the platform and wave a brief farewell. In the few short minutes that the train was stopped, Alec passed Joan his suitcase of civilian clothes and a bag of cricket paraphernalia, before saying goodbye to them all. ‘I wonder when I shall be needing my cricket stuff next,’ he wondered to himself as the train pulled out of the station.

  * * *

  The Dunkirk episode was not a triumph for British forces. On 23 May 1940 Alec was evacuated out of Boulogne. Though physically unscathed, he was shaken to have witnessed as much bloodshed during a single aerial bombardment of the harbour as he had seen during his spell in the mud of Ypres. A number of men were killed in front of his eyes, one of whom he had dined with that evening. On his return to London he learned that his wife had made up her mind to close Edrington and return with her children to Australia for the duration of the war. Her departure was a bitter blow for Arthur who believed that, once she and the children were embarked for the Antipodes, he would never see them or the house again. He wrote to her in a desperate state:

  My dearest Joan,

  When I first heard that you and the children were going to Australia, I felt it was the last straw. In very truth I turned my face to the wall and wept. But on reflection I see that that was pure selfishness; and that it is the right thing for you to save the children the shock of a possible air-raid. I only hope the sea-voyage may be propitious; but I shall know no peace of mind until you are safe in Australia.

  My dear, you cant think how I shall miss you. It is not that we meet so often; but the thought you are all so near and so happy has been a continual comfort. ‘La reine est là bas dans l’île.’ I shall keep on hoping that we may meet again. If not, I want you to remember that in your sympathy and affection I have found continual peace, and that some of the very happiest days of my life have been spent at Edrington, with all you dear ones around me.

  God bless you, dear, dear Joan – you and the children, and bring us all together again – ‘Oh heart in the great dawn!’

  Ever your loving and grateful Poppa

  In the first week of July Joan was packed and ready. Arthur and K rushed down to Edrington to say their last goodbyes. He was looking and feeling old. Afterwards he wrote to his friend Kenneth McMaster, transferring most of the emotion to his wife: ‘K felt their departure very, very much. She mainly lives for those grandchildren and the thought that we are not likely ever to see them again is a thought that we have to set aside. I write to Alec's wife every week, and she sends us splendid letters; but that is not the same thing as seeing.’ The children were still very young: Andrew was seven, Veronica six, and Peter two. They remained in Australia until the war was over. Alec pondered on how different they would look the next time he saw them – if, that is, he survived the war. ‘I was saying goodbye to their childhood,’ he later wrote – but without emotion.

  In Australia Joan received a long letter from Arthur every week and it is through these that the relationship between Arthur in his last years and his two sons is best recorded. Needless to say all references to Alec are glowing. A small spattering of examples should suffice:

  1.9.40: We have had Alec here, waiting for his summons to Matlock, and he has been simply splendid. His kindness, consideration and unfailing cheerfulness have been an inspiration.

  8.11.40: Alec has sent me a dozen sauternes which is most kind of him.

  28.12.40: Alec has been most good to us, and wrote to me just before Xmas the best letter any father ever had from any son, to say he had found much comfort in having our hearth to come to in these days of comparative homelessness.

  22.1.41: Evelyn and Alec dined in a smart restaurant in Leicester Square, which I expect you know, but I don't. I do hope Evelyn was decent to Alec, who is so uniformly

  kind to everyone. Now that he comes to us practically every weekend, we have always something to look forward to; and though he is often too tired to talk much, it is a great comfort to see him sitting here and to know that he is safe and well.

  But from these same letters it is painfully obvious that Arthur's relationship with Evelyn was consistently bad. Evelyn was happier now. He was interested in his work as both a writer and a soldier. He was joyfully married to Laura. His circle of friends was extensive. Visits to his parents were a duty of obligation and he went to them without enthusiasm or pleasure. They, he felt, did not care for him. He, they felt, was bored by and ashamed of them. Unable to hide his irritation and despondency, Evelyn, on his rare visits to Highgate, succeeded only in making matters worse.

  In 1938 Chapman and Hall, anxious that their most precious asset should not desert them for a rival publisher, invited Evelyn to join the board. Alec claimed that his father and brother worked peacefully together at board meetings, but Arthur's diary does not always support this: ‘Chapman and Hall committee meeting. Evelyn laid railing accusations against Gatfield for the way his book had been produced and the “intolerable impertinence of his reply”… an awful 40 minutes. Evelyn like a smouldering volcano.’

  When, in 1941, two new men on the board tried to sack Evelyn, who was receiving £150 a year but was unable to attend meetings, Arthur was both loyal and uncharacteristically defiant:

  I have told them that I shall vote for Evelyn, even if mine is the only vote cast in his favour. One must stand by one's own family, and I do think it rather lousy to try to oust a colleague who is fighting for his country. Short-sighted policy, too, from their own point of view, for Evelyn's tongue is bitter, and he will not say much that is good of Chapman and Hall in the days that are to come.

  Away from the board room, things between Arthur and Evelyn were less rosy. Evelyn was determined to keep his movements secret from his father but when Arthur met an ex-Highgate schoolboy from Evelyn's battalion and asked after his son, the young soldier (Thomas, by name) told him where the battalion was stationed and what it was doing. Evelyn was furious. ‘He was all for getting the youth arrested, or disembowelled, or something lingering with boiling oil in it,’ Arthur wrote to Alec. For years Evelyn had felt that his father did not care for him, but now it was Arthur's turn to feel the full force of Evelyn's rejection. In January 1941 Evelyn was granted a fortnight's leave. His one visit to Arthur was fleeting and cursory. In his diary Arthur had noted that Evelyn was ‘very arrogant and dictatorial’. The full details were relayed the next morning in a letter from ‘your loving Poppa’ to ‘My darling Joan’:

  Evelyn burst upon us. He rang up one day when we were both out. On our return Margery3 reported ‘Mr Evelyn wished you to know that he is at Claridges.’ K got busy with the telephone and he and Laura arranged to come to lunch next day. They came. She was looking rather fragile, but really very pretty. He has shaved off his moustache, which is an improvement, and put on a good deal of weight, wh
ich is not. I think he is trying to make himself look like Winston Churchill,4 and with a little grease paint and a toupet, he might play the part. He was really very cold, arrogant and contemptuous. Considering this was the only time he was going to spare us out of a 15-day leave, I think he might have been a little more patient. I know that I make him itch all over. Everything I say puts his teeth on edge. Still it is an old story: ‘Don't shoot the pianist, he is doing his best.’

  A month later Arthur was still stewing about that visit. He wrote to Kenneth McMaster:

  Evelyn, a Captain of the Marines, was in the Dakar fiasco and is now in a secret commando, of which we are allowed to know nothing. He never writes to us but a month ago he had 15 days leave, out of which he allowed us precisely two hours, when he and his wife came to lunch. From the time they drove away we have not heard a word from either of them. The fact is he is thoroughly ashamed of his parents and does his best to banish them from his conscience.

  Father and son reached an impasse during the war years. They could not avoid aggravating one another. Alec believed it was because Evelyn and Arthur were so alike that they were unable to get on. In a generous portrait of his brother, written in 1967, he suggested: