Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  As I was writing this letter over a cup of coffee in the Piazza del Duomo, I had one of those lunatic experiences which can only happen when one is alone. A gruff,

  nightmare voice said in the language of Texas: ‘Odd stuff all this, very odd.’

  I: ‘Yes.’

  It: ‘People odd too, don't you think?’

  I: ‘Yes.’

  It: ‘Do you suppose they think we're odd?’

  I: ‘Very.’

  It: ‘Venerably?’

  I: ‘Venerably.’

  It: ‘You did say venerably?’

  I (beyond caring): ‘Yes.’

  It (as I thought): ‘I was kidding.’

  I (alarmed): ‘Where? That is odd.’

  It (after a pause): ‘I don't know that I like you.’

  I never heard it again, nor did I see the person responsible. It seems to come straight out of Muriel Spark's book about madness. Very worrying.

  With love from your affectionate son, Bron

  When The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold was published a month after this letter was written Evelyn gave Bron a smart presentation copy and inscribed it: ‘For Auberon Alexander in the hope that Pinfold's trouble is not hereditary.’

  In another letter to his father from Italy Bron described his experiences with a German criminal and pathological liar:

  We had a very exciting week recently harbouring a confidence trickster. We met him in a bar in the cheaper part of Florence and he told us that he was a German student called Karl von Schmidt (which made us suspect him immediately – de Smith indeed!) However he wanted lodgings and so we gave him the address of our own lodgings which were far cheaper than his present ones. We left the bar at about 12, and at 3.30 a.m he burst into our room saying that he had lost the key of his car and he demanded a bed. So we sat up with him playing poker dice, at which he was

  lamentably bad and lost 3000 lire – next day he wanted to borrow money so I gave him a couple of hundred hoping to get rid of him. Not a bit of it; he reappeared for lunch to say that he would pay the landlady for a month in advance. This went on for a week, when he told us that he had paid her, which he hadn't, as we well knew. He had told her we were his friends and she now asked us to pay for him. So I picked his pocket while Rob showed him some paintings and extracted the necessary money. Next day we decided to expose him. The German Consulate had never heard of him, nor did he have a motor car. We decided we should be armed in case he turned nasty so I solemnly filled two socks with sand from the banks of the Arno and we waited for him to reappear, but he never did. Great anti-climax to an exciting week. He had an extraordinary streak in him that he always proffered a lie at any stage, and we had great fun spotting the contradictions, which were frequent.

  I suspect this story to be almost entirely fabricated. It has that ring about it. In an untitled novel, never published, Bron described two seventeen-year-old English boys who spend their year off together in Italy. The book contains a scene in which one of them attempts to write a dutiful letter home to his father.

  Dear Papa, he wrote in his crabbed painstaking hand, Jonathan and I arrived safely in Perrugia. What else could he tell him?… Also there is a very amusing German student here called von Schmidt. What could he tell his father which would make Schmidt sound interesting? He decided to invent but his imagination was not as forthcoming as Jonathan's. He has a very lively trick of drinking beer while standing on his head, he wrote, and then wondered if it struck the right note of gay, sophisticated, cosmopolitan life he had intended. He crossed it out and wrote instead: He does the most amusing parodies of German opera, especially Wagner.

  Evelyn was richly entertained by Bron's correspondence and sent friendly letters in return, but at heart he was not a happy man.

  His depressions were growing deeper and more frequent, and he was falling out of love with the Catholic Church:

  Dear Bron,

  Thank you for your letter. I hope you spent longer in Rome than you intended and did not waste too much time in forums and imperial ruins but instead explored some of the superb renaissance areas of the city.

  I spent the last four days of Holy Week at Downside. Did you know a boy named Mortimer? If not it is too late. They buried him on Easter day. Poor Fr Passmore was much occupied with this sad event. Otherwise I am sure he would have joined with the other monks in sending his love. There were none of my particular friends at the monastery this year and I found the time, impoverished by the new liturgy, hanging rather heavy…

  The monks advise that you ride your Vespa armed with a pistol. I don't.

  Your affec. papa

  While Bron was in Italy Evelyn's parental attentions were consumed by his favourite child Meg who was falling off the rails at Ascot. She had broken out of her bedroom at dead of night for a picnic feast on the golf links, had swallowed a phial of mercury, which she had stolen from the chemistry cupboard, and had, according to her Mother Superior, ‘reached the stage where tolerance is no longer practicable. Her conduct and attitude are wholly to be deplored. It is so sad that she can only use her strong personality just now in a negative and destructive way.’ The nuns asked Evelyn to come and talk to her.

  Meg wrote to her father in distress:

  Darling Papa,

  You and Mummy are the kindest parents anybody could

  ever have. You are the most wonderful father. I long to leave this place because it is really the separation from you and Mummy I mind more than anything. But I realise that if I do leave I am proving myself a coward and a failure. I cannot bear the idea of you having to be ashamed of me and I think you would if I proved myself incapable of a boarding school.

  O Papa I cannot come to a decision. I loathe this place and feel it is too late to start again. But I have many friends and a few whom I am genuinely fond of. I would make no friends at Taunton but I do not mind that. To live at home with you and Mummy is all I could wish for. Papa, please tell me truthfully soon if you would mind, if you would be ashamed. I know it is cowardly… but is there any point in making myself miserable when I needn't be?

  Papa, you know me as well as I know myself, please decide for me. I trust you, I do not trust myself.

  Evelyn's immediate decision was to remove both Meg and her sister, Hatty, from Ascot and send them to a Catholic school near Combe Florey in Taunton.

  I have hired a punt. Your first duty will be to clear the island in the lake of all vegetation. You will have many arduous duties to atone for your naughtiness at Ascot. I am not ashamed of you. I think it is best for you to leave. No one is going to persecute you. But remember you are not returning in triumph and mustn't expect red carpets and silver bands…

  hope this doesn't seem a cross letter. I am not cross with you sweet Meg.

  Papa

  When Bron joined the army in September 1957 he was eighteen years old. His initial posting was to the Royal Horseguards HQ at Combermere Barracks, near Windsor, then to the Guards depot at Caterham and finally to the Officers Training School at Mons Barracks near Aldershot. As Evelyn had predicted, the contrast between Florence and the army was a rude one and Bron hated every minute, especially at Caterham. His parents sent him cakes, books, magazines and letters. ‘Thank you very much indeed … I cannot tell you how comforting it is to think that there are benevolent agencies working somewhere outside this wilderness of malice and violence and stupidity.’ After a weekend visit to Combe Florey, where Bron escaped the ‘depravity and ugliness’ of the army, Evelyn wrote to Lady Diana Cooper: ‘My son Auberon has grown very tall and handsome but is losing his wool.’

  Bron's passing-out ceremony was in March 1958. He wrote to his parents: ‘If all goes well I pass out on Thursday 20th – I don't suppose you would like to attend the parade, but I have been told to ask you.’ He might not have ‘supposed’ that his parents would like to attend but he was nevertheless disappointed when they didn't. However, by the time he came to write his autobiography in 1990 he had decided that it was ‘probably a
good thing’:

  My parents did not attend the passing-out parade at Mons, alone, I think, of all the parents involved. In a way this was probably a good thing, as my father would probably have worn his grey bowler or Brigade boater, and my mother, although the kindest and sweetest of women, had no great sense of style. She had one fur coat, of astrakhan, but it was at least twenty years old and had lost much of its fur. It had once had rather a smart belt, but this had long been replaced by binder-twine.

  So unembarrassed by any eccentrically dressed parents I was taken out by a brother officer and his mother to the Hog's Back Hotel, outside Guildford, where we ate canard à l'orange and returned feeling slightly sick.

  After ‘passing-out’ Bron was sent on active service to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, but not before a short sojourn at Combe Florey. ‘Bron has got his commission in the Blues,’ wrote Evelyn proudly to Lady Diana Cooper, ‘many sons of old Blues failed. He must have guts, he succeeds. Scholarship at the house and now this. But he's a queer morose boy, sloping round the woods with a gun alone or playing light opera on his gramophone. Teresa has had a dazzling term academically. But Meg for me anytime.’ Evelyn's attitude to his six children is succinctly summarised in another letter from this period ‘Bron is going bald, Meg is fat as suet. Teresa dirty. Hatty dotty. The little boys just little boys.’

  In 1958 Cyprus was a Crown Colony, where British troops were engaged in holding the peace between rival factions of Greeks and Turks while the governor, Sir Hugh Foot, worked out a plan for sovereign independence. The Greek majority wanted the island to be part of Greece, although they fought among themselves as to how, where and why. The Turkish minority wanted taksim, or partition, whereby the island would be split and they would govern their own half.

  By the end of 1958 twenty thousand British troops were stationed there: riot, shooting and bombing between all factions were on the increase. There was no war, as such, only regular small acts of terrorism. In April, seventy-five explosions, accounting for twenty-six murders, were recorded on the island; in May, there were twenty-seven bombs and fifteen murders. Life for the British troops was exciting. There was no front-line action, but they occupied their time swaggering around with machine-guns, looking wary and important, guarding, searching, arresting, checking, shooting at trees or tin-cans, blowing up rocks and wooden sheds for the sheer fun of hearing a bang.

  Bron, as a second lieutenant in the Royal Horse Guards, had command of a handful of men and found the experience of being saluted, being abroad in the sunshine and being an officer in a smart regiment an exhilarating contrast to the undignified drudgery of military training at Aldershot.

  So much happens here that I really cannot think where to begin [he wrote to his father]. Life is immensely exciting and unbelievably comfortable. Nearly every day we are out on some raid, roadblock, search or patrol.

  They say they are going to start ambushes again tomorrow, but everybody rather doubts it. At the moment they are not shooting much; although one cornet claims he heard bullets whistling past him, nobody believes him. Bombs however are exploding at the rate of three every 24 hours, and we sometimes go rushing to the scene; quite often the Cypriots blow themselves up as they are not very expert in handling them.

  Evelyn, who liked nothing more than the excitement of military action and was at that time engaged in writing a sanctimonious biography of a priestly friend, was, I suspect, a little jealous of Bron's Cyprus adventure. When his son's commission papers arrived at Combe Florey Evelyn turned them over and over, rummaging through drawers to compare them with his own:

  A document came to you from the War Office which I opened hoping to save you trouble. It is your commission. I take it that you would sooner it was kept here. The Queens copper-plate hand has deteriorated since her fathers day, as have her titles of honour. George VI described himself on my commission as ‘by the Grace of God of Great Britain and Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India etc’. Your Queen describes herself as ‘Head of the Commonwealth’. However, though inferior in station she has the same view of you as her father had of me. You are her ‘Trusty and well beloved’. She reposes ‘special Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage and Good Conduct’. You score over me in one particular. I was charged to ‘exercise and well discipline in arms both the inferior officers and men serving under me’. You are to ‘exercise and well discipline in their duties’ (not so good) ‘such officers, men and women as may be placed under your orders from time to time’. I was never given charge of women. Congratulations. Treat them severely.

  As the author of such off-beam epistles as this one, it was courageous of Evelyn to criticise Bron's letters home for being too concerned with his military exploits. Was there nothing more amusing he could report from Cyprus? What wild flowers had he seen on the island? What did he eat for breakfast? Had he met Evelyn's friend Lord So-and-so's son or the Marquess of Whatnot's boy? Bron replied in ironic tone:

  I am sorry that I was not sufficiently explicit in my last letter. I have met the Dunnes. I have not met the Fox-Strangways. There are several species of plant in flower, but I am unable to identify them. I arise at 6.15, being called by my servant. I have breakfast at 6.35. The first parade is at 7.10. The crews then retire to their vehicles until 12 o'clock and then that is the end of my working day, unless we are being sent out on a patrol, roadblock or ambush. These occur about three times a week. We do not catch anyone. The last is the most boring as we sit all night in an olive grove from 7pm to 4.30am and see no one and drink something disgusting called self-heating soup.

  Randolph Churchill arrived here, was fêted by Colonel Julian and asked for your telephone number, which I had forgotten, but he said that he would get hold of it.

  Drink in the mess is enormously cheap, outside unbelievably expensive. We are only allowed into four approved bars/restaurant/nightclubs at any of which a glass of whisky costs 19/6; in the mess it costs 4d.

  The day is spent sleeping, playing bridge roulette pontoon murder backgammon dumb crambo.

  We have to carry guns everywhere. I cannot hit a human sized target at 10 yards with 20 shots once with my assured pistol, which I am constantly in fear of losing.

  Love Bron

  And that was Bron's last letter to his parents from Cyprus.

  Evelyn wrote to his friends: ‘Cornet Waugh is enjoying himself top-hole in Cyprus,’ and, on 9 June 1958, he wrote, with his fingers crossed, in a letter to Lady Diana Cooper: ‘My boy is a cornet of horse. I hope he has some fighting.’ How could he have known as he wrote those words that on that very evening his eighteen-year-old boy would be lying on the thin, hot road between Guenyeli and Orta Keuy slumped in a pool of his own blood, gasping for his life?

  I never saw my father's bare arse or his exposed genitals and am glad of that, as a passing glimpse of either might have traumatised me for life – I am indebted to his modesty. Others – friends from school – who regularly witnessed their parents’ trooping the corridors or even the kitchen stark naked felt perfectly at ease with the situation. I have heard it said that the regular spectacle of a naked parent is good for the growing child – it turns him into a man, or something like that. Perhaps I was too neurotic as a youth, but the fear of chancing on a friend's father's backside on an alien landing made me a reluctant guest in all their houses. I may have lost a few friends because of it.

  The rights and wrongs of parental nudity are complicated. They always have been. Don't expect any help from the Bible. God punished Ham for peeping at his father as he lay naked in a drunken stupor; elsewhere the patriarchs clasp their fathers’ pricks while making solemn promises to them. So, Christians, what line are we expected to take? In the nineteenth century Lord Esher shared his bathtub with his son through the entire period of his education. Both Esher and little Reginald ended up lunatic but their example does not seem to have stalled the naturist movement. Evelyn wrote to his eldest daughter, Teresa
, in June 1961:

  Yesterdays Sunday Times had an article on paternity by Mr Mathew M.P. He said it was essential to the happy relations of fathers and children that they should congregate at bath-time. The children should stand around their father s bath. The spectacle of his nakedness and wetness while they are clothed and dry established confidence and equality. I am sorry I failed you in this.

  I wonder if harboured recollections of naked fathers are more likely to puncture or augment the sexual confidence of young males. I wonder, also, in my own father's case, if his erotic sensibilities were not slightly impaired by the seminal shock of seeing (aged three) his nonogenarian step-great-great-grandmother naked in her bath. Her name was Grace Wemyss: she was his mother's mother's mother's stepmother. ‘How beautiful you are looking today, Granny Grace,’ he is said to have said. Evelyn, oblivious to the psychological damage this grotesque spectacle might have inflicted upon his little boy, wrote proudly in his diary: ‘Auberon surprised her in her bath and is thus one of the very few men who can claim to have seen his great-great-grandmother in the raw.’

  For fear of damaging my own children in this way I have ordained that they are never to look upon, to witness, even to ponder for an instant my zones privés. When I caught my son standing on a bucket to ogle me through a downstairs lavatory window I lectured him on the sin of Ham – no apology. In fury I composed a short verse for the moment and ordered him to recite it by heart within the hour or lose his claim to supper:

  I do not wish, nor ever have,

  To see thee, Daddy, on the lav,

  And though, I s'pose, thou art oft bare,

  ’Tis thy concern and thine affair.