Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  In later life Evelyn may have given the impression of being heartless; he was often snubbing, he could be cruel. But basically he was gentle, warm and tender. He was very like his father, and his father's own emotionalism put him on his guard. He must have often thought: ‘I could become like this; I musn't let myself become like this.’

  To prove his immunity to Arthur's worst fault – sentimentality – Evelyn struck attitudes of immoderate detachment, exaggerated often to the point of absurdity. The more emotional Arthur became, the more Evelyn vaunted his sangfroid. Or was it the other way round? In either case, they fed one from the other, locked in hopeless, tireless battle. In September 1940 Evelyn informed his father that Laura was pregnant with a third child, due in December. Later he wrote home: ‘Laura's baby was born on Sunday and lived for only twenty-four hours. She was baptised, Mary, before she died and will be buried in Brushford Churchyard tomorrow. It was an easy birth, and Laura is in excellent health.’ The letter went on: ‘I have got three days’ leave and return to my commando on Friday.

  Life is more easygoing there than in the marines; many old friends and acquaintances are with me, and I find the life highly enjoyable.’ Arthur, who had craved a daughter all his life, was deeply shocked by Evelyn's apparent indifference to losing one of his own. He was also offended that the news had not reached him until the day after the funeral. In anguish he wrote again to Joan: ‘There seems to be something quite pathetic in this little star of life, which just flickered and went out. She wasn't wanted and she did not stay. Evelyn announced her coming “to the regret of all and the consternation of some”. Well, she didn't trouble them for long, and she is spared a great deal.’

  The war had been interesting and unusual for Evelyn. He was sent hither and thither, from Cornwall to Scotland, from Gibraltar to Egypt. He assisted in the evacuation of Crete and the raid on Badia. Arthur and K relied on Laura to send them regular news but, as Arthur bitterly conceded, ‘Letter-writing, at any rate to in-laws, is not Laura's strong suit.’ It was true that she hated writing even to her husband and procrastinated in the hope that events would overtake her and no letter would be necessary – a dilatory attitude that exasperated her father-in-law: ‘Whether Evelyn is still in Cornwall or transferred to the Mediterranean we have no idea and it is a worry not to know. I think K is going to write to Laura and find out; but I doubt if Laura answers for days and days. She is the most lethargic girl I ever knew.’

  On the rare occasions that Laura did get round to writing, Arthur was far from satisfied. In September she wrote to him only to point out that ‘Evelyn could not say where he was going, and said he did not know how long he would be away – maybe a month, maybe a year. The rest of his letter only dealt with what I was to do in case of invasion.’ This was not strictly true. Evelyn's long letter to Laura contained news that Arthur would have liked to hear but Laura was too vague and lazy to pass it on. Steaming with tension, Arthur wrote to Joan: ‘Evelyn, we presume, is in the Mediterranean, but we know nothing, and Laura's letters are like soppy bread dipped in tepid water.’

  His anxiety was intensified by K, who seemed to be sinking into a deep depression. She missed her sons and her grandchildren but, above all, was terrified by the bombing in London. Laura had offered her parents-in-law refuge at a cottage on the Pixton estate but this was proudly declined. When Highgate was first bombed on 30 August 1940, K woke Arthur at 1.15 a.m. They took refuge for the rest of the night in a neighbour's basement. Tuppence, the poodle, showed no emotion and K hugged him tightly all through the night. Ten days later Arthur informed Joan:

  K is a very sad and ill-looking woman. It tears at my heart to have anyone say – ‘Mrs Waugh is looking very ill. Can't you make her rest more?’ But there is nothing any of us can do. I had a little walk with her the other day and she said ‘My world has crashed about me. There is nothing more in life until this is all over. You must remember I am 70. If I hadn't looked it till now, it was because I was happy. Now happiness has gone and look what I am – an old woman. I am doing my best. You must be patient’… And indeed I am, and I do try not to annoy her. But my way of comforting is not her way of being comforted. And that is the conclusion of the whole matter.

  North End and Highgate took another battering at the end of October. By this stage K was weary, pale and hollow-eyed. Arthur, certain that she needed stimulant, tried to press burgundy and port on her, but she would not touch them. Again he wrote to Joan:

  I am particularly troubled about K. She goes steadily on her way but everyone says how ill she looks; and the other evening when a bomb burst near us during dinner, she left the table and I found her sitting on the stairs, saying – ‘Don't speak to me. I can't speak. It is shattering.’ In five minutes she had picked herself up again; but a night later, when an explosion went off, she jumped up in a way that shows her nerves are all like harp-strings… No word of Evelyn. In the background of my mind is always a growing anxiety of what might befall him, now that the scene of

  attack seems likely to shift to the Mediterranean. I expect K thinks of it also and all the time; but I don't mention it as I try to keep her mind off it – not that I succeed.

  Arthur needed to hear from Evelyn if only to calm his wife's nerves. Life at Highgate was no fun when K was in such a state: ‘We changed our dinner hour in the hope of finishing dinner before the bombs fell, as they upset K and she can't go on eating when the raid is near us. But that is no good, for last night, just as we were starting, the whole house shook and K retired into the bookroom and I had to dine alone. Later on she returned and had some rice and stewed pears – nothing more – and I don't think that is enough to dine upon.’

  When at last news arrived from Evelyn in November 1940, just after the destruction of Arthur and K's neighbourhood by German bombing, the tone of his letter made Arthur miserable again. By this stage he was hypersensitive to Evelyn's slightest demur. He wrote to Joan and asked her what she thought of the tone of Evelyn's letter: ‘I know that I am not apt to take Evelyn the right way, and perhaps his air of cold detachment is not so heartless as it seems to be.’ Well, what do you think?

  My dear Father,

  My leave expires tomorrow and I am afraid that my return journey takes me up the West Coast and not through London. I do not however despair of seeing you and Mother fairly soon as I am trying for a transfer to a more melodramatic force than the Marines and if this comes off I will probably be in London for a day or so.

  Chapman and Hall seems under very unliterary direction and I leave my fate to fortune. I do not think that there will be much use for small firms even those fortunate enough to have directors like Gatfield.

  Laura is extremely well. I have a cold.

  I hope the bombs hold off until my civilian wardrobe is evacuated – and longer still.

  We went to Piers Court on Sunday and found the house

  over-flowing with refugees, in good order, but the garden rapidly relapsing into jungle of the kind from which we rescued it.

  Thomas was a great failure with our battalion and dismissed. I do not know his future. I found him a very affected and stupid fellow.

  Sad about the destruction of North End but we have the consolation of many odious buildings that have disappeared. You cannot really make many mistakes with high explosive in London nowadays. Sorry about Holland House. The heir, Harry Stavordale, is in the force I seek to join.

  Love from Evelyn

  By September 1941 Alec had pushed his luck so far with chunky Joan Duff that she had upped and left him for another man. His mistake had been to move into his own London flat with her where his presence was immediately resented and she became short-tempered and poisonous. They remained friends although Alec's heart was broken. Evelyn noticed and wrote to Laura: ‘My brother is deeply and genuinely in love with that giantess who came to lunch at the Perroquet.’

  On 27 September the four Waughs, Arthur, K, Alec and Evelyn, lunched together for the last time. That evening Alec was l
eaving for Syria to act as a publicity agent to General Spears. Two days earlier he had broken the news of his departure to Arthur: ‘Alec arrived in a car with much kit and went upstairs to pack,’ wrote Arthur, in his diary. ‘He gave me 6 bottles of sherry. He was very silent and thoughtful and I felt very sad.’ He might be gone for two years or more and Arthur, ‘the old sentimentalist’ as he oft-times referred to himself, sensed that this might be their last meeting: he was seventy-five years old, tired, fat and ailing. By chance Evelyn was in town that day and rang to invite himself for lunch. ‘As it turned out this was a very good move,’ Arthur recorded, ‘as he was amiable and cheerful and helped to stave off the anxiety of Alec's departure.’

  For once Arthur decided not to wear his heart on his sleeve. ‘Nothing is really so bad as we think it will be,’ he had written in One Man's Road, ‘the parting, the new venture, the unknown road, the shadowy corner – something, some power within ourselves or without, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.’ And so on this, the momentous occasion of his beloved elder son's departure to the war, Arthur restrained his emotions with a dignity that surprised everyone. ‘This was an occasion that could have been sentimentalised,’ Alec wrote later, ‘but we treated the luncheon as though it were any luncheon. We did not make an occasion of it.’ The final sighting came all too soon. ‘He and Evelyn left us at 4pm,’ Arthur wrote. ‘It was a ghastly wrench to say goodbye to Alec, especially as he was so kind and gentle. But his taxi vanished through the drive and we were left sorrowing.’

  The next day Evelyn wrote to Laura: ‘Alec Waugh went off last night to embark for Syria. It is sad for my parents and for me as it means I now have them on my conscience.’ He had just finished his latest novel, a light and amusing ‘pot-boiler’, as he termed it, about people jostling for purpose in the first years of the war. Arthur did not especially enjoy Put Out More Flags. ‘Read Evelyn's book,’ he scribbled in his diary, ‘but can't get on terms with it. Hope it is my fault.’ He wrote to Evelyn that he had not liked the beginning, that it picked up towards the end and that it was full of misprints. His letter also mentioned his worries about contacting Alec and revealed the sad news that Tuppence, the fearless poodle, had died. Evelyn replied:

  Dear Father,

  I am sorry to hear of the death of your poodle. You speak of it as having happened some time ago. This is the first news I have had. Please accept my warmest sympathy. I hope you will soon find another who will take his place in your heart.

  Glad you liked most of Put Out More Flags. It is a minor work dashed off to occupy a tedious voyage, but it has good bits…

  I am commanding a company again, living in squalor. We returned yesterday from a happy week at sea and re-embark next week.

  A letter of yours was enclosed in your letter to me probably in error. It dealt with Beverley Nichols. Do you want this back? His inaccurate gossip about me caused pleasure on the lower deck but nowhere else.

  You cannot expect to hear from Alec for some time after he arrives. I expect he is warm and content and in good company. We seem to have forestalled the German offensive in Cyrenia. I cant think what possessed the papers to forecast a triumphal advance to Tunis. We are lucky to hold the enemy at all. Syria should be safe until early Spring so don't fret about Alec.

  Love Evelyn.

  Arthur might have recognised a vignette of himself in Put Out More Flags. Although he had moved from Underhill a decade earlier, he continued to rhapsodise about the ‘old’ house and to extol the virtues of its ‘little inglenook’ and ‘stout timbers’. He wrote to Alec that he had received a letter from Barbara Jacobs's sister who was sheltering from the Germans with her father at Paignton. ‘She said that the return of war had brought back the past, and that she hoped we realised how much Underhill had brought into her life that she could never find at home. I wish the little place no better epitaph.’ In Put Out More Flags Evelyn regurgitates Arthur's sentimentality about Underhill through Mrs Harkness, a minor character, whose house is inspected with a view to its receiving three evacuees:

  Mrs Harkness pointed out all the features of the house with maternal pride…

  ‘You may think me fanciful,’ she said, remote and whimsical, ‘but in the last few weeks I feel sometimes I can see the old house smiling to itself and hear the old timbers whispering, “They thought we were no use. They thought we were

  old stick-in-the-muds. But they can't get on without us, all these busy go-ahead people. They come back to us when they're in trouble.”’

  ‘Agnes was always a poet,’ said Mr Harkness. ‘I have had to be the practical housewife.’

  Evelyn's next book, interrupted by the war, contained a character based partly on Arthur and partly on his friend the solicitor E. S. P. Haynes, who had acted for him and Alec in their divorce cases. The first chapter of Work Suspended, originally entitled ‘My Father's Death’, later ‘My Father's House’ and finally ‘A Death’ marked a new depth of purpose in Evelyn's writing. In December 1941 he informed his father, ‘My major work, unfinished in 1939, appears shortly as a fragment in Penguin … It is about a father with whom you will be unable to trace any similarities.’ But Arthur did trace similarities and so, too, did Alec.

  The father in question, Mr Plant, is a painter whose works are ‘suffused with the spirit of Dickens’. He is an arcane type who lives on his own in a house not unlike Underhill in St John's Wood, dresses in the old-fashioned garb of the 1890s and considers himself the last survivor of his class. Arthur, recognising his own reflection, may have taken comfort in Evelyn's warm, serious approach, for Mr Plant is no straight gibe in the manner of Prendergast or Mrs Harkness. His son, the novelist John Plant, writing in the first person, visits his father's house after the funeral and gazes on a painting left unfinished at the time of his father's death: ‘The four or five square feet of painting were a monument of my father's art. There had been a time when I had scant respect for it,’ but in brooding on his father, putting his life's achievement into words, John Plant's esteem for him rises: it ‘took form and my sense of loss became tangible and permanent’.

  The first part of Work Suspended deals specifically with the physical, psychological and spiritual breaking of bonds between father and son. After his death Mr Plant's house is demolished. The total eradication of the father and his house enables the son to develop as an artist. There is a discernible parallel here between John Plant and Evelyn, who in the last nine years had severed ties with Arthur by marrying Laura, changing faith and moving away from his father's house as well as his sphere of influence. In Work Suspended Mr Plant is run over by a shady character called Arthur Atwater – ‘Atwater the dreamer, Atwater the scout, Atwater the underdog’ – and, as the plot advances, the reader is made dimly aware of Atwater's literary pertinence as the symbolic alter ego of John Plant, the son. When Plant Junior put a ten-shilling note into an envelope ‘and sent it to the man who killed my father’, the reader wonders if he is not complicit in his father's death. Since the book was left unfinished we shall never know what Evelyn had in mind. In any case the death of his real father soon intervened.

  In London without Alec and Joan, Arthur kept himself busy. He continued to read manuscripts for the ‘old firm’, to chair the board, to walk on the Heath, to watch Highgate School cricket matches in the summer and to teach Victorian poetry to schoolchildren once a week through the winter. His diary tells of a full and busy life right to the end. Each day he wore a different tie given him by Alec, which, he believed, brought him good luck. If only Alec were there to straighten them! He wrote to ‘my very dear Billy’ at the end of 1942: ‘Albert Knight came to tea with me last week and mentioned that his daughter has a way of pulling his tie straight which annoys him rather. I said that I too had a son who put mine in order, and oh, how I wished he were here to do it this moment.’ But time was running short and Arthur knew in his heart that Alec would never straighten another tie for him again. In the months remaining to him he adverted more frequently than eve
r to his own demise. It had long been a theme of his conversation – his father, the Brute, and his grandfather, the rector of Corsley, had been the same – but now, in the long, winding sentences about his past, his childhood, Midsomer Norton, Sherborne, the end was never far from his mind. Forty years earlier Arthur had bought the freehold of a burial plot in Hampstead churchyard and he walked there often to admire the spot and to ponder his interment there. Terrified that someone might usurp it, he staked his claim with his visiting card attached to a stick. Thirty years previously he had written detailed instructions for his family concerning his funeral arrangements and regularly refreshed their memories. His tombstone was to bear the legend from St John: ‘And another book was opened which is the book of life.’

  In his last two years, since Joan's departure for Australia, Arthur had found consolation in another quasi-daughter figure, the wan, pale, childlike, pre-Raphaelite-looking Elizabeth Myers. She was a struggling novelist in her late twenties when they first met. On 21 June 1942 she wrote to a friend: ‘I was taken this afternoon to have tea with Mr and Mrs Arthur Waugh. Mr Waugh is a glorious old man. He is just like a character from Dickens, fat, smiling and wise, with a face like a lovely big red apple. I got on famously with him and we are to go again right speedily.’

  Arthur was intrigued and excited by the young lady. In August he wrote to her: ‘At present I know next to nothing about your life and want to know more, do come and have a long talk.’ Soon they were the best of friends. He put pressure on ‘the old firm’ to publish her novel, A Well Full of Leaves, and invited her to attend Chapman and Hall board meetings. She proved a loyal and sympathetic confidante.

  On her regular visits to Highgate Arthur told Elizabeth all about his childhood, about Alec, about Sherborne – the school, the town and the golden abbey in the west. He confided his loves, his hopes, his dashed ambitions and his childhood dreams. She, in turn, dedicated her book ‘To ARTHUR WAUGH with Homage and Love.’ She also dedicated a pagan stone to him, attaching to it the mystical petition: ‘Not for a happy Death for him, for Death is always happy: but that he shall have a HAPPY DYING.’ Three months later, transported in wonderment by his lively descriptions of Sherborne, and desiring nothing more than to see the enchanted place for herself, Elizabeth set off, with a letter of introduction from Arthur, to visit Littleton Powys, widower, writer and schoolmaster who had been a pupil at Sherborne in Arthur's day. The old man showed her round the school and pointed out the plaques commemorating Alec's sporting triumphs – what a lovely day! Within a short space of time, Elizabeth and Littleton were married. But Elizabeth was herself terminally ill, destined to expire at the tender age of thirty-four.