Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  Brideshead Revisited abounds with similar sentiment: the same fruity nostalgia, the same juxtaposition of old architecture and modern vandalism, the same conflict of tradition and change, the same vein of rich, tea-cake prose. Evelyn, of course, was a finer writer than his father:

  Oxford – submerged now and obliterated, as irrecoverable as Lyonness, so quickly have the waters come flooding in – Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days – such as that day – when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave

  our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously over the intervening clamour.

  Alec claimed that the new emotionalism of his brother's writing was directly caused by Arthur's death. Evelyn, he believed, had guarded himself against sentimentality all his life until, free of his father's example, he had found himself at last able to indulge his natural inclination.

  A great deal of Brideshead is autobiographical. The hero, Charles Ryder, has much in common with the author, especially concerning the relationship between father and son. Ryder, a painter who, like Evelyn, serves as a captain in the war, has two children, one of whom is born while he is away on active service. When he returns on leave he shows no interest in his daughter and cannot even remember his children's names. Ryder's father, Ned, is a close, semi-affectionate portrait of Arthur.

  During his university years Charles Ryder is in constant conflict with his father but, like so many of the fathers in Evelyn's novels, Ryder pére is an eccentric who hides behind a screen of his own dottiness to deflect his son's arguments. Like Evelyn, Ryder finds his father depressing while others adore him, and like Evelyn Gardner, who described Arthur as a ‘complete Pinkle-Wonk’ in his velvet dinner jacket, Julia, Ryder's girlfriend, thinks that his father ‘sounds like a perfect poppet’. Arthur Waugh's gasping asthma attacks are recalled in old Mr Ryder's ‘snuffles’. Like Arthur, he refers constantly to his youth and how things were ‘in my day’.

  My father was in his late fifties, but it was his idiosyncrasy to seem much older than his years; to see him one might have put him at seventy, to hear him speak at nearly eighty. He came to me now, with the shuffling, mandarin-tread which he affected and a shy smile of welcome. When he dined at home and he seldom dined elsewhere – he wore a frogged velvet smoking suit of the kind which had been fashionable many years before and was to be so again but, at that time, was a deliberate archaism.

  Like all fictional Evelyn Waugh fathers to this date Mr Ryder is distant, unhelpful, one might say uncaring, even a little malicious towards his son. But for all that he is an attractive character. His wry wit may be uncongenial to Charles but the reader delights in his parlour games and looks forward to his every appearance:

  ‘It's a very long vacation,’ he said wistfully. ‘In my day we used to go on what were called reading parties, always in mountainous areas. Why? Why,’ he repeated petulantly, ‘should Alpine scenery be thought conducive to study?’

  ‘I thought of putting in some time at an art school – in the life class.’

  ‘My dear boy, you'll find them all shut. The students go to Barbison or such places and paint in the open air. There was an institution in my day called a “sketching club” – mixed sexes,’ (snuffle), ‘bicycles,’ (snuffle), ‘pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, Holland umbrellas and, it was popularly thought, free love,’ (snuffle), ‘such a lot of nonsense. I expect they still go on. You might try that.’

  The nuns removed themselves and all their paraphernalia from Piers Court on 12 September 1945. Evelyn moved back in immediately and the children returned from Pixton when the house was considered ready to receive them after Christmas. Boxing Day was spoiled for Evelyn by their arrival:

  Teresa and Bron have arrived: he ingratiating, she covered with little medals and badges, neurotically voluble with the vocabulary of the lower middle class – ‘serviette’, ‘spare room’. Only on points of theology does she become rational. By keeping the children in bed for long periods we managed to have a tolerable day… The children leave for Pixton on the 10. Meanwhile I have my meals in the library.

  When Evelyn was not avoiding his children, feeling irritated by them, dying of boredom in their presence, he made great efforts to entertain them. He taught them games, drew pictures for them, told fantastic stories of his childhood, rollicked with exaggerated laughter at their jokes and took them out for walks and on expeditions to local sites of interest. At Christmas he took them to the pantomimes at Bristol and Bath and bought ‘trashy and costly’ toys for their stockings. The strain of it all demoralised him. He could not sustain his interest in them for long – but he tried hard nevertheless. ‘I went home for two nights to find my boy more personable and manly. I drew pictures, played games, climbed the roof and was exhausted.’

  Evelyn was a bad sleeper, dependent for many years on a dangerous cocktail of alcohol and chloral. He did not have a natural gift with children and could not see them in any other light than as ‘defective adults; feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humourless’ and, as such, they wearied him. Most of the evidence dragged out to prove his viciousness as a father is drawn from his own private diaries and letters; but, needless to say, they do not tell the whole story.

  We are all bored by our children on occasion and the world might be an easier place if we were only frank enough to admit it, but modern parents tend instead to furrow their brows, force smiles on to anxious lips and talk down in sentimental goo-goo voices that sometimes stick even after their children have grown up. This, I believe, is the way to damage children. This is what Arthur Waugh did.

  Christmas was always a bad time for Evelyn. I think he suffered from a problem that, since his day, has been identified as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, a lowering winter lethargy, now identified with a gene that once had something to do with our distant ancestors hibernating. I suffer from it too. In his least good book, an African travelogue from 1960, Evelyn explained his Christmas blues:

  Childermas is the Sabbat of cafard. I have just looked up this popular word in the dictionary and have learned, as no doubt the reader already knows, that its roots come from ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘cant’. It is therefore peculiarly apt for the emotions with which the father of a family performs the jollities of

  Christmastide. It is at Christmas, as a rule, that I begin to make plans for my escape, for, oddly enough, the regularly recurrent fit of claustrophobia always takes me by surprise. Writing now in high summer, it seems hardly conceivable that I shall ever want to leave my agreeable house and family. But I shall, next Christmas, and no doubt I shall once more find myself with no plans made.

  The next Christmas was just the same. His diary entry for 23 December 1946 shows that it was, as usual, steering him into a heavy gloom:

  The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression. I do not see them until luncheon as I have my breakfast alone in the library, and they are in fact well trained to avoid my part of the house, but I am aware of the them from the moment I wake. Luncheon is very painful. Teresa has a mincing habit of speech and a pert humourless style of wit; Bron is clumsy and dishevelled, sly, without intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual interest; Margaret is pretty and below the age of reason. In the nursery whooping cough rages I believe. At tea I meet the three elder children again and they usurp the drawing room until it is time to dress for dinner. I used to take some pleasure in inventing legends for them about Basil Bennett; Dr Bedlam and the Sebag-Montefiores. But now they think it ingenious to squeal ‘It isn't true.’ I taught them the game of draughts for which they show no aptitude. The frost has broken and everything is now dripping and slushy and gusty.

  I cannot read this passage without feeling a little sorry
for Evelyn. It is all very well cooing, oohing and bridling on the children's behalf, but Evelyn was the sufferer here, not his children. There are times when my own brood affects me in similar ways, when I, too, seek refuge in the library from the tyranny of their noise and deadly paraffle of their physical presence. It doesn't hurt them. They are not damaged. Of course it would be ideal if I never had such hostile feelings towards them in the first place, but I do and I am stuck with it. Honesty is the only virtue left to a parent in this condition and Evelyn was unusually honest.

  When my father published his autobiography in 1991 the press exploded with indignation over an anecdote concerning a bunch of bananas. The story, simply told, is that bananas were not available in England during the war. When the fighting stopped and the first shipments resumed the government decreed that every kiddie in the land should be issued with a banana coupon exchangeable for a free sample at his local greengrocer. Teresa, Bron and Margaret (or Meg, Evelyn's third surviving child) had apparently been apprised of the deliciousness of this tropical fruit and were greatly looking forward to tasting it. I shall let my father continue in the words that caused the outcry in 1991:

  When the great day arrived and my mother returned with the bananas, all three were put on my father's plate and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three. A child's sense of justice may be defective in many respects, and egocentric at the best of times, but it is no less intense for either. By any standards he had done wrong. It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him, but he was permanently marked down in my estimation. From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.

  Neither of my aunts, who were present at this dèbâcle, remembers the episode. I am not suggesting that my father invented it, only that he, like Evelyn, was unable to control his greed. A boy who, by his own admission, fills his pockets with jam tarts rather than greet his father back from the war is not in a strong position to moralise about other people's banana hogging. Nor do I feel heartbroken when a six-year-old is denied a new taste experience, as they usually fuss and spit it out. Of course it was greedy of Evelyn to scoff them all but it was also greedy of Bron to let it fester. No one comes out of this tale smelling of roses – but it was not the shocking example of parental cruelty that the press at the time tried to portray.

  Laura's happiness at Piers Court was drawn mainly from her cows. She owned six or seven of them, some named after her daughters, all jealously guarded by herself and the cowman, Mr Sanders. Sanders had been imported from Pixton and Laura was a little in love with him. Evelyn affected to be unable to remember his name. Every year Laura's cattle made a loss, but never enough to dampen her enthusiasm for them. The happiest moments of her day were spent in discussing her herd with Sanders, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of individual beasts, comparing moos with milk yields, moving them slowly from one field to another and wondering what to do with them next. Sanders had a room in the attic at Piers Court where, after two years, he died and his amplified and extended death rattle woke everyone in the house.

  If Bron ever suspected that his mother was more interested in Sanders and her cows than she was in her children, he may have been right. I do not suppose that he resented this at the time, but later on, when he had become a father, these things rankled. In his autobiography he wrote: ‘My mother had only a few cows and they cost a fortune to keep, but she loved them extravagantly, as other women love their dogs or, so I have been told, their children.’

  From an early age Bron suffered from an ‘alternating squint’, which meant that one of his eyes was so badly aligned with the other that he suffered occasional spells of blindness. It was first diagnosed by a doctor in Exeter and Evelyn, on the advice of an exiled Pole living at Pixton, took him to a Harley Street specialist in January 1944, but the problem persisted. A year later Evelyn wrote to Laura from Dubrovnik:

  I am sorry Auberons eyes are worse. It seems to me that the money we spent at the command of the Polish miner has gone down the drain. If he cannot see it seems to me hopeless leaving him in a class with children who can. Can

  you not get him special tuition? He will grow up like an American if you are not careful. His cousin Andrew Waugh is to go to sea – a very good idea. I would send Auberon but eyes are particularly important to sailors. Can you make him a musician? I can imagine life so little without sight that I can advise nothing.

  By the time Bron was seven urgent action needed to be taken and he was sent for an operation at a hospital in Bristol. Evelyn, perhaps remembering the trauma of his appendicitis at about the same age, was particularly kind, rushing back and forth from the hospital bringing, on one occasion, a box of white mice to amuse Bron in his convalescence. The ward sister was furious.

  Bron came round from the anaesthetic to find he had been blindfolded and his arms strapped to the side of the cot to prevent him removing his bandages. ‘I think it may have been the lowest moment in my life,’ he later recalled. ‘Although equable by nature, I have never felt such rage as I felt then.’ When, at last, his arms were untied, he was flogged by the nurse for scratching at his bandages. Many years later, when he was famous, she wrote to him begging his forgiveness.

  A letter from Laura to her sister, Gabriel, sent at the time of Bron's operation, affords a glimpse of the whole tragic episode from a mother's perspective:

  Darling Gabriel,

  … I suppose you have heard about my madness at last Fridays sale – I went mad and paid £108 for I think the most beautiful Guernsey cow I have ever seen. Sanders and I fell in love with her from the moment we saw her and we waited until the end of the sale for her and then the bidding went haywire and we found we had paid this colossal price for her. We were still not upset because we thought her such a wonderful cow but when we got her home we found she was only giving one gallon a day – though she was sold as giving four gallons and feeding her

  calf. It is all most peculiar. She has a magnificent udder, not at all pendulous but silky and rectangular and firm. Just like all the pictures of perfect udders you see in farming papers. Anyhow Sanders and I are feeling very sad, foolish and perplexed as we really cannot see what to do with the beastly animal. Yesterday she improved faintly and gave 18lbs – anyhow don't make a story about it – I feel far too deeply.

  My life at the moment is hellish – I motor every week into Bristol for Bron to do eye exercises which take half an hour – all the rest of the week I seem to spend in shopping…

  All my love to you, Laura.

  In 1948 a new nanny arrived at Piers Court. Vera Gilroy was the eldest of nine children from an impoverished mining family of the Merton Colliery in County Durham. When she came down by train to Gloucestershire she knew little of the ways of an English country house. She was just fifteen and very innocent, expecting Laura to greet her at the station in long silk robes and a diamond tiara. Instead she was met by a scruffy woman – with tousled hair, in rough muddy trousers held up with binder-twine – who drove her back to Piers Court in a rickety old pick-up truck. Her heart sank when she realised this was the lady of the house and it sank further when she met Bron. ‘Do my hair!’ he ordered her imperiously – but soon she got the hang of him and they became firm friends. The children adored her. She was not much older than they and later, when she was married and calling herself Vera Grother, Bron and Meg would descend on her cottage in the village to smoke cigarettes away from the disapproving glare of their parents. Laura was not cold but her head was in the clouds and she was never demonstrative. In her heart I think she was a sad person. Like Evelyn, she did not possess a natural gift of communication with the young, but her affection for her children increased as they grew older. Evelyn, on the other hand, cared too much. His irritation, especially with the elder two, was engendered by their failure to reach the high standards he set for them. He minded how they spoke, the words they us
ed, the clothes they wore, the books they read – he passionately wanted them to shine. When he found Teresa reading a women's magazine given her by one of the staff, he snatched it away and tossed it ostentatiously into the fire. When Vera gave Teresa a children's novel by Nancy Breary for Christmas he confiscated it. Vera was terrified, but the next day Evelyn came into the nursery with the novel in his hand, ‘Vera is a genius! This book is awfully well written,’ he proclaimed and returned it to Teresa.

  Clothes were a problem. Laura was not interested in buying new ones so all of her children were fitted out in scruffy, falling-to-bits hand-me-downs from cousins or servants. When the girls were sent to boarding-school they had no knickers. Laura asked Vera to sew up the fronts of some of Bron's old underpants to give them a more feminine look, but Vera, appalled on the girls’ behalf, snuck out to Dursley and bought them some proper kit with her own money. In the holidays at Piers Court Bron mostly wore his school uniform as there was nothing else on offer. He was given an air-gun and a chemistry set for making bombs – in those days you could order the ingredients for nitroglycerine from an inexpensive shop in London. He walked around the house with a binder-twine belt, like his mother's, tied over his school blazer with several dead sparrows dangling from it. These, added to the mixed and spilled contents of his chemistry set, combined into a pungent whiff that radiated outwards from him – far more deadly than his Uncle Auberon's Aqua di Selva.

  Evelyn deplored his children's scruffiness but was too lazy to do anything about it himself and unable to galvanise his wife into action. When he noticed a bowl of rotting fruit on the kitchen table he said to Laura: ‘If that bowl is not removed by tomorrow luncheon I shall throw the contents at you.’ The next day the fruit was still there. Laura stood erect, fuming but rigidly accepting her punishment, as Evelyn, in front of two of his children, launched one after another of the rotten fruit at her, until the whole of her upper torso was splattered and drenched in over-ripe flesh, pips and skins.