Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  For he is but a craven fool

  Who muses ’pon his father's tool,

  Or creeps and peeps and tries to spy

  What lies within poor Papa's fly.

  So when thou next perchance be nude

  Fear not lest prying eyes intrude,

  For I who hold thee, Daddy, dear,

  Know well thy law and won't go near.

  J. R. Ackerley, writing about his brother in his memoir My Father and Myself, described Peter's ‘thin white buttocks and abnormally long dark cock, longer than my own or any other I had seen’. This, I think, is going a step too far and I would never venture to such a treatment of my own father even if I had that sort of information to hand. No – the subject only arises here because the rest of Papa's body, that part which I was permitted to see on the occasions of his swimming on our long summer holidays in the South of France, made a profound impression upon me.

  For those who were unaware, the only clue to what lay beneath his shirt was the evidence of his left hand. A translucent scar ran past his thumb to a plump reddish mound, which was all that remained of his left index finger. It horrified my schoolfriends, and he relished the sight of young people recoiling from his deformity. He used to regale them with stories of how his finger had been bitten off by a Royal Bengal Tiger, caught in the string of a kite during a hurricane or had dropped off, quite inexplicably, that very morning.

  If his left finger stump was disconcerting to behold, his back and chest were far worse. The front left side of his chest was gravely disfigured, as though the whole area from his left nipple to his armpit had violently imploded. On his back he had a scar two inches thick that ran from his shoulder to a deep, dark crevice behind his left elbow. This, to the squeamish, was a frightful sight.

  Exactly what happened on 9 June 1958 is still shrouded in mystery. My application to the historical-disclosures department of the Army Records Office was returned only after six months of pestering with a heavily censored account of the official inquiry into the accident and a dossier of ‘top-secret’ information (sent to me in error) relating to my cousin Peter Waugh's hush-hush operations in the 9th Lancers.

  One version of the accident was narrated by my father in an article, entitled ‘The Ghastly Truth’, that he published in the New Statesman fifteen years after the event:

  It was a very pleasant day with a school of Turkish policemen passing to and fro, being taught how to ride motor-bikes. We had been told to fraternise with them and they with us, so we waved enthusiastically every time they passed, waiting for one of them to fall off and cheering every time it nearly happened.

  I had noticed an impediment in the elevation of the Browning machine-gun in the turret of my armoured car, and, having nothing else to do, resolved to investigate it. Seizing hold of the end with quiet efficiency, I was wiggling it up and down when I noticed it had started firing. Six bullets later I was alarmed to observe that it was firing through my chest, and got out of the way pretty sharpish. It may encourage those who have a fear of being shot to learn that it is almost completely painless, at any rate at close range with high velocity bullets. You feel a slight tapping and burning sensation and (if shot through the chest) a little winded, but practically no pain for about three quarters of an hour afterwards when, with luck, someone will have arrived with morphine, if you are still alive.

  My first reaction to shooting myself in this way was not one of sorrow or despair so much as mild exhilaration. I lay down behind the armoured car and explained what had happened in words of a few syllables, to incredulous murmurs of ‘coo’ and ‘cor’, while an enterprising corporal climbed into the turret and tried to stop the machine gun. He managed it about 250 rounds later when the belt was nearly exhausted and a huge hole had been dug in the Kyrenia road. That is my memory of the incident, although there is no particular reason why people should prefer it to other versions.

  Alternative accounts of the accident circulated then and continue to circulate to this day. Some said that he was shot in the back by his own men. My aunt Hatty believed that his corporal accidentally fired on him as he emerged from a building that was being searched for traces of the friends of the EOKA terrorist, Colonel Grivas; some say that one or both of his testicles were shot off. The Daily Express, in a front-page news story headlined ‘Evelyn Waugh's Son Badly Wounded’, claimed that the accident took place in the middle of a village, darkly hinting that a third party might have been involved. ‘He was hit by a burst from a Browning automatic when it was accidentally fired.’ The Daily Mail, also on its front page, went a step further:

  MRS WAUGH FLIES TO BEDSIDE OF WOUNDED SON Mrs Evelyn Waugh, wife of the novelist, will fly to Cyprus today to visit her 18-year-old son, accidentally shot by one of his men while patrolling curfewed Nicosia. His mother said: ‘My flight has been arranged by the Red Cross and I hope to leave London Airport early tomorrow. My husband will remain at home.’

  The Times announced that ‘Second Lieutenant Oubyn Waugh’ was ‘accidentally shot during anti-riot operations in the Nicosia area’. According to the report of the Army's internal investigation, Bron ‘declined to make any comment or give any explanation’ at the time. Afterwards he signed a statement claiming that no one was in the Ferret car or in any of the other cars. Of the soldiers who were with him, none appears to have seen what happened. He was entirely on his own, out of sight of his men, privately, incompetently, mending his gun.

  Evelyn's decision not to fly out to his son's bedside is hard to understand. The doctors all assumed that Bron would die. To Lady Diana Cooper he wrote, four days after the accident:

  Laura is in Cyprus with Bron. His life is very precarious. He seems to have had more than one bullet in lung and spleen. Details are wanting, but it sounds as though he will never completely recover. I shall go out to travel home with Laura if he dies.

  One good result of the newspaper reports is that monks and nuns and priests all over the country are praying for him. Prayer is the only thing.

  Evelyn was furious with Bron: he took the view that he had shot himself in a flagrant act of exhibitionism and was consequently a disgrace to the Waugh name. The reason that ‘details were wanting’ was that Evelyn had an eccentric distaste for the telephone and refused ever to answer it. News of Bron's condition had to be telephoned to Laura's sister, Bridget, on a farm twenty miles away; she drove to Combe Florey to relay it to her brother-in-law. When Laura's letters from Cyprus started to arrive, Evelyn put a stop to Bridget's visits. At home, working on his priestly biography, he refused to allow any conversation about Bron's trouble. The original excuse for not flying out was that his friends Henry and Pansy Lamb were coming for the weekend and could not be put off. Later he modified this: prayer was the only solution to Bron's predicament and his own presence at his son's bedside would be of no use to his recovery. If I were a psychoanalyst I would plunge at this point into an interpretation of Evelyn's behaviour based on his experiences in the First World War when his father fussed and flapped at Underhill with anxiety over Alec. I would ascribe Evelyn's cold, detached reaction to Bron's pitiful condition as a subconscious reversal, a reaction against the memory of that trauma of 1918, an attempt, perhaps, to break away from his upbringing etc. etc. However, I am not a psychoanalyst, so I shan't ‘go there’ as they say. I leave it instead for others to decide – what do you think? On the roadside Bron was given the last sacraments as he and his troops waited anxiously for medical assistance. On the way to the Royal Military Hospital in Nicosia the regimental doctor stood over his bed reciting the De Profundis while Bron spluttered responses through mouthfuls of blood. On arrival he was operated on immediately. With feeble implements and astonishing skill, the army surgeon diligently removed his spleen and two ribs; a third rib was wired together. Bron's left hand was also seriously damaged. Attempts were made to revivify his left index finger, which had been dislocated and fractured by one of the bullets, but if they failed, he was warned, it would have to come off.
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br />   Sifting the evidence from a ball-and-claw footed armchair in Combe Florey Evelyn smelt something fishy about the circumstances of his son's accident. Laura's first letter implied that it might have been Bron's fault for failing to unload the gun and that he would probably have faced a court-martial had he not been so badly injured. In her second letter she announced that everyone had fortunately agreed that it was no one's fault except the gun's: ‘Apparently no one was to blame – it was the machine gun in the turret of an armoured car and no one was in the armoured car at the time and no accident like that has ever happened before. They think it must have been the heat but even so they cannot really understand it.’

  A hurried investigation team hastily decided that Browning submachine guns can quite easily fire off 250 rounds all by themselves and the case was closed. Writing to his friend Ann Fleming nine days after the accident, Evelyn observed:

  It has been an anxious week but today the news from Cyprus makes it seem probable that Bron may survive. He stopped six bullets and has had a lung, his spleen, two ribs and part of a hand removed. Few people can have lived after such a fusillade. All done by the unaided and independent action of a new-fangled machine-gun. I have known many good soldiers hit by their own side (including a posthumous VC) and several rather moderate soldiers who shot themselves, but this is the first time I have known the weapon take control.

  It is the end of his army life, I am afraid, but the surgeons seem to think he may be fit for all but the most strenuous activities one day.

  Will you please give this information to anyone in London who enquires?

  Unable to move from his bed, Bron impressed everyone with his bravery. The heat in Cyprus was stifling – often as high as 108°F during the day. Matters were not improved by painkillers which made him hallucinate, an abscess in his chest which had to be drained every other day of poisonous fluids, and a running high temperature of 102°F. For a week he was unable to speak more than a few stuttered words as his mouth was filled with tubes and the effort exhausted him. Laura saw him for fifteen minutes twice a day. As he strengthened, the length of her visits increased. For weeks on end he received no word from his father or from the rest of his family in England. Every day Laura begged her husband to write, but he did not respond:

  11 June: I think it would be a good plan if you all started writing to him.

  June: Do write to him and get everyone else to too. He longs for letters.

  June: Do please write to him and get all the Herberts to write. He does long for letters.

  June: He has received no letters. Please get everyone to write to him, he longs for it and all he thinks about is Combe Florey and the family.

  June: Do get everybody to write. He longs for news and things to take his mind off his present life and he cant read books yet.

  On 21 June Laura received a telegram from Evelyn wishing her a very happy birthday – but still nothing for Bron. The first and possibly the only letter he received from his father in Cyprus arrived on 22 June. Sadly it has been lost. By this stage Laura's implacable calm was fraying:

  Do please write and get lots of other people to write it doesn't matter what, loving letters, newsy letters, anything. But Bron is often in pain and often pretty dopey but what he likes are things to either take his mind off his pain or else to meditate dreamily about. So far he has only received two letters, one from you and one from Margaret, and as the days go by it is such a disappointment to him. He particularly requests that there should be no let up in the prayers for him – he feels he needs them badly, especially now. I am so glad I came out to him, I think it does make a big difference. I read to him a lot now.

  All the while Bron was painfully aware that his mother wanted to get back to England. He pleaded with her to stay, and the doctors backed him up, impressing on her the importance of her bedside vigils:

  He hates me being away and says if only he has someone to talk to it makes the pain and the heat more bearable. Also I do quite a lot of swabbing his face and giving him cold drinks and bullying nurses to move him when his bed sores get too uncomfortable.

  He announced today that if he died he implored us to have him flown back to England and buried there. He could not bear to be buried in Cyprus.

  Laura was uncomfortable in the heat and felt herself to be a terrible imposition on her host, the governor. She did not think she had the right dresses to wear, bought a couple of new ones, felt frumpy in them, and wrote to Evelyn for instructions on etiquette and procedure at a governor's abode. ‘As soon as it is safe for me to leave,’ she wrote, ‘I shall return.’ She was missing Evelyn, missing her marigolds and, above all, she was missing her cows:

  Could you please deal with a couple of farm problems – will you tell Giovanni to give 1 spoonful of cow-cake daily to Magdelen and Desdemona this week and 2 spoonfuls daily to them from next Monday – Also is Lucy still giving 40lbs a day milk she had better be artificially inseminated next time she comes bulling with the Aberdeen Angus bull. If she is not giving as much as 30lbs I do not want her served at all.

  Bron fought on courageously in the expectation of imminent death. His sister Meg had written to say she had given up ice-cream in some superstitious bid for his recovery; but he did not trust her and worried that if she had even a small taste of it he might die. He was also anxious that the family might soon lose interest in praying for him and precipitate his demise. For week after feverish week he lay in agony, clinging to life by the slenderest of threads. A small improvement on one day was invariably followed by a major setback requiring surgical adjustments on the next. The searing heat rendered doctors and nurses as dizzy and delirious as their patients. Laura reported, ‘Today was the hottest thing I have ever known. We just sat and panted opposite each other. It was too hot to talk or think… Oh how I long for the coolness of England!’ For two days after the arrival of those letters from Evelyn and Meg, Bron tried his best to write a reply. The note he finished after two days’ intensive labour was never sent, but it has survived. It was written in a jagged pencil script that is in places illegible:

  Dear Papa, Meg, and everyone at Combe Florey,

  Thank you all for your letters. They are an enormous comfort. But Mummy has lulled you into a false idea of my condition. While in no danger now of dying I am in daily… agony. Doctors stick needles into me to drain fluids, my back where the bullets came out… and sore… with pain… so KEEP praying please. The heat is appalling.

  It was rather worrying earlier on to think my life depended on Meg not eating ice-cream. What would have happened if the temptation had proved too great?

  All my love,

  Many many thanks for the letters and please KEEP PRAYING

  LOVE BRON

  Laura's hoped-for return on the twenty-first was delayed by further setbacks and complications on the twentieth. Bron was not taken off the danger list until the twenty-ninth and it was only then that she felt it safe to return to her husband and her cows. After her departure for England Bron languished in Cyprus for a further week and a half before he was transported on a stretcher by military plane to a hospital at Millbank in London, but his problems were far from over. It was a further nine months and twelve operations before he was fit enough to be discharged from hospital. On his arrival in England Evelyn was not present to greet him.

  Instead he had decided to honour the foundation of the city of Munich with readings – which the Germans would not understand – from his books. He did, however, send a letter:

  My Dear Bron,

  Welcome home. I am delighted that you have escaped from the torrid and treacherous island of Cyprus. I wish I could come and greet you but I have a long-standing and very tedious engagement in Germany. It started as a treat for your mother, who now can't come with me. I am being paid to stand up in a theatre in Munich and read aloud for an hour to an audience of Huns who think that such a performance will somehow help celebrate the 800th anniversary of the foundation of their city. I am sure neither
the Huns nor I will enjoy it.

  Teresa who, insanely, means to spend August in Turkey will visit you, then your mother, finally I. I cannot tell you when dear little Septimus will arrive. Your grandmother has dashed off to persecute Lord de Vesci but no doubt she will soon be at your bedside.2 She is well known to raise all invalids’ temperatures five point degrees.

  I hope you get a decent room to yourself overlooking the river. If the walls seem bare tell your neighbour Sir John Rothenstein3 to bring round a few of the fine paintings he keeps hidden in the cellars of the Tate.

  For spiritual comfort summon Mgr. John Barton, 43 Palace Street, Victoria 7635, a learned, very tall, slightly bawdy prelate who has been praying for you.

  The pea-hen has laid two more eggs and is sitting. The pea-cock is so bored we can't keep him out of the house.

  Yours ever affec. E.W.

  On the day that this letter was written Evelyn learned that his friend Lord Stavordale's son, Stephen Fox-Strangways, had been killed in action in Cyprus. The boy had been in Bron's regiment and had visited him in hospital the day before he was hit by a terrorist sniper in Nicosia. My father claimed he was shot coming out of the hospital, but I am not sure that was true. He was twenty years old. Evelyn was devastated by his death: all his stifled emotions about Bron suddenly vented and expressed themselves in a welter of grief at the Fox-Strangways’ assassination. From Munich he wrote to Nancy Mitford:

  Thanks awfully for your letter about Bron. It was an anxious three weeks and painful for Laura who had to spend them under armed guard in the great heat, which she hates. It is Harry Stavordale who has been struck down. You saw? His only surviving son murdered. Tragedy doesn't seem appropriate to him and Nell. There is no conceivable human mitigation for their suffering.