Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

To another friend Evelyn wrote from Munich: ‘I have been hit very flat by Harry's tragedy … In a way I feel it is more poignant for Bron's recovery.’ But Bron was still far from well. Evelyn saw him for the first time on his return from Munich, probably on 15 or 16 July, more than five weeks after the accident. When he arrived Bron was asleep and by his bed, written in his son's jagged invalid hand, a note:

  Memorandum: Waugh to Dr—

  Duties expected by Mr Auberon Waugh of his orthopaedic advisers:

  Constant attendance and advice in orthopaedic matters

  Curative treatment

  Sobriety in dress and behaviour

  A proper regard for the relationship between patient and physician. Given this day.

  Evelyn immediately made arrangements for Bron to be transferred to a more comfortable hospital. When he finally talked to his son he was life-enhancing – witty, warm, sympathetic, clever, profound. If Bron had borne him any grudge for not writing or not rushing to his bedside in Cyprus, all was now forgiven. As soon as he was transferred to the better, cleaner, more ably administered Rock-Carling Ward of the Westminster Hospital he wrote to his father. Still, on 28 July, he thought he might die. The abscess in his back had developed into chronic empyema, or accumulation of pus, in the chest cavity. Too embarrassed to express his love to Evelyn's face he put it in a letter, sealed it up, wrote on the back ‘For my father E. Waugh in the event of my predeceasing him, Auberon Waugh’, and sent it to his bank in Oxford with instructions to pass it to his father after his death. The bank held on to it until Evelyn died in 1966, when they returned it to my father. Embarrassed, he buried it at the bottom of an old tin chest and thought no more about it. Written on the envelope in a bank clerk's hand are the words: ‘He does not wish his father to know of the existence of this letter.’

  Dear Papa,

  Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any other man in the world.

  My possessions belong to you in any case, and will obviously be retained, divided or jumble-sold at your discretion, but I should very much like my collection of gramophone records to be given to the Grothers (that is Vera and her husband).

  Love Bron

  On 2 August Evelyn went to London for his second visit to Bron – his first in the new hospital. He wrote to warn of his arrival and Bron replied:

  Dear Papa,

  I should love to see you on Saturday and Sunday, more than

  anything in the world, but the pleasure will alas be confined to gazing on your features as I am speechless at the moment with a sore throat. But you can read to me or we can pass each other little notes, or big ones for that matter. I can't remember exactly when Mama said she was coming but if this reaches home in time could she load herself with patent medicines instead of peaches, as the hospital despises them but can't cure me with its own mixtures.

  Letters and gifts arrive daily from the whippery. The great whipping man himself was here yesterday, jovial but surprisingly sober; I didn't taunt him with the second-hand wax earplugs his wife had sent me a few mornings before.4 With him, and smelling like Cleopatra in her barge on her way to meet Antony for the first time, was Uncle Auberon.

  Don't come during an authorised visiting hour, but walk in any other time. You won't be treated with the reverence you found at Mill Bank, and which is your due anywhere, because nobody here has ever read a book in their lives, which is rather a relief for me as it saves me many impertinent enquiries. But play the poor parent from Somerset and they will be as plasticine in your hands.

  Auberon brought some chicken paste and promised to bring oysters, champagne and foie gras. Whipper brought some greengages and promised nothing, but encouraged Auberon in his fantasies. W. also lent a very pretty picture book of Baroque by a German.

  Nowadays I neither sleep nor eat nor talk. I feel the only way to remain human is to write long bad letters to everyone.

  Love from your affectionate son, Bron

  Still too unwell to undergo the major operation that doctors had in mind, Bron was transferred yet again to another hospital. No sooner had he arrived than he received a letter from his father there stating that he was not rich enough to continue the monthly allowance he had been giving him and that since Bron was in hospital he probably did not need it anyway. Bron ripped up the letter in a fury. ‘I wept bitter tears of rage when I read it,’ he remembered later.

  Dear Papa,

  Thank you for your letter. Far from being upset by your action, I am enormously grateful that you should have been so generous as to continue my allowance up to this moment. I hope that you soon overcome your financial difficulties. Mushroom growing is said to be remunerative or you could open a lodging house.

  Before long Evelyn's temporary feelings of warm solicitude had turned to irritation that Bron was being spoiled by streams of guests at his hospital bedside. In August he wrote to Bron's godmother, Mary Lygon:

  Auberon Alexander is having his character undermined by well disposed people who pamper him sitting round his bed and satisfying his every whim. He will be in hospital for many weeks and all the good done by the army at Caterham and Mons is being undone and he will be a sponger all his life. Jolly lucky if he can find people to sponge on, say I. I can't. My daughter Margaret is the joy of my heart, perhaps what you were to your father, only she does not bring me cocktails in my bath. My daughter Teresa is in Constantinople. I will not tell you of my other children, they live with rabbits and are mentally retarded. Auberon Alexander is in Sister Agnes's Home in Beaumont Street. Perhaps you will go and beat him and rob him and undo the bad work of others.

  In the middle of October Sir Clement Price-Thomas, the distinguished surgeon who had ostentatiously failed to cure George VI of his lung cancer and eventually died of it himself, decided it was time to cut off Bron's left index finger. Of all his injuries, the depredations to his left hand were among those that upset him the most and the amputation of his finger, though a minor operation, was a distressing emotional experience. Evelyn wrote to comfort him:

  Dear Auberon Alexander,

  The man who calls on you purporting to be my brother Alec is plainly an impostor. Your true uncle does not know your whereabouts and supposes you to be here convalescent – as witness this card which came with a volume of his describing the more obvious and picturesque features of the West Indies. Did your visitor offer any identification other than baldness – not an uncommon phenomenon? Had he a voice like your half great uncle George? Did he wear a little silk scarf around his neck? Was he tipsy? These are the tests.

  Your sister Harriet tells me you are to be operated on this week – the ponderous and intricate machinery of Sir Clements mind having at last come to movement. I hope you enjoy the anaesthetic and that your awakening is not too disagreeable. Your mother told the Jesuits that you were to be operated on last week and they all prayed hard. I daresay God can postpone the effects. He must anyway be awfully bored at the moment with all the prayers for Pius XII who is already sitting pretty. Much better to pray for Chips Channon whose case is more precarious.5

  Your Aunt Gabriel is obsessed by the need to lend you a relic of the true cross. Contrary to all experience she thinks it safer to send it by hand of Herbert than by post.

  Your sister Margaret had a sharp attack of alcoholic poisoning, as the consequence of having been put in charge of the wine last weekend.

  I resolutely deny myself butter potatoes bread etc and am shrinking in girth in a most encouraging way. My life otherwise is without interest.

  Mr Coggins broods about your condition perpetually.

  Your affec. EW

  On 17 November Bron spent his nineteenth birthday in bed at the Westminster Hospital where he had returned for further operations. Evelyn sent birthday greetings from Combe Florey:

  My dear Bron,

  Many happier returns of the day. It has been a year of triumph and disaster, has it not? I am
sure you feel very much more than a year older. To have looked into the throat of death at 19 is an experience not to be sneered at.

  I am dispatching your sisters to you, one today, a second on Monday. I have no other present than the blameless quills. Some time I hope very soon you will need a civilian wardrobe which will cost over £100. That must be your birthday and Christmas present. It is important to start out with a sufficiency of proper clothes.

  Your mother tells me you are now a civilian and pensioner and that your pension may be delayed. If you are short of money I will, of course, advance it.

  Your Aunt Bridget tells me you think of chucking English Literature as a school. If your college will let you, I strongly advise it. It is a fatal school for anyone who may, as I hope you will, become a writer. History, even read as sketchily as I read it, is a good school. Modern Greats now called something like ‘P.P.E’ provides general knowledge. I think you might find Law too inhuman. But you are master of your fate and captain of your soul now you are out of your teens.

  A suggestion – why not read a lot of French? Light literature if you like. But a long spell in bed seems a good chance to enlarge your vocabulary and idiom.

  I will call next Sunday.

  Your affectionate papa EW

  That Christmas Evelyn, desperate to escape from his family at Combe Florey, decided to take Meg for three days’ fun in London. Together they went to see Peter Pan and the first London production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, which Evelyn described as ‘an intolerable Irish-American play about a family being drunk and rude to one another in half-darkness’. On Christmas Day he took Bron out of hospital to lunch at the Ritz where they were moved to pity at the spectacle of rich old pensioners sitting unloved and on their own, with paper crowns on their heads, joylessly stuffing Christmas fare. Isn't it odd how these little things stick in the mind? My father never forgot it and used often to mention these people, holding them up to his children as a ‘parable of human selfishness’.

  Harriet (or Hatty), Evelyn's fifth child, suffered from dyslexia but no one in those days, neither her parents nor her teachers, was able to diagnose it. Evelyn concluded that she was backward and in letters to friends wrote her off as ‘my dud daughter’. At Combe Florey she and her brother James had become obsessed with the breeding, stroking and avid petting of rabbits. Evelyn, who had cherished his own rabbits as a boy at Underhill, was at first enthusiastic but after a while began to see in Hatty and James's undiluted enthusiasm only further indication of their mental derangement. Hatty's favourite, Gabriel, and another called Raphael fell to the myxomatosis virus in December 1958, but James had cunningly taken a pair to school which, despite masculine names – Michael and Harvey – succeeded in breeding together a whole new generation. Back at Combe Florey in the Christmas holidays Evelyn complained that the rabbits were not entering enough into the spirit of the season and gave them each a goblet of vodka to perk them up. They expired of alcohol poisoning on New Year's Eve.

  57All printed versions of Evelyn Waugh's diaries have a mistake here: ‘Those who most reprobate and ridicule their fellows…’ The original clearly says ‘fathers’.

  58Bron's grandmother, Mary Herbert, was the only child of the 4 Lord de Vesci. The Lord de Vesci mentioned here was her first cousin, Yvo, who died a month later on 28 August 1958.

  59Director of the Tate Gallery from 1938.

  60The ‘whipper’, as mentioned, was philosopher and farmer Alick Dru, married to Laura's eldest sister, Gabriel Herbert.

  61Pope Pius XII and Sir Henry Channon had both recently expired.

  XIII

  Leaving Home

  So Bron finally escaped the privations of the Westminster Hospital in March 1959. A chaise-longue was brought by cattle truck from Laura's sister's house to Combe Florey for the purposes of his recuperation and for four months he languished upon it, daydreaming, smoking, reading P. G. Wodehouse, occasionally poking his nose out of doors and, much to his father's irritation, dropping matchsticks and ash all over the floor. Evelyn was abroad for a lot of this time but not long enough to diminish his irritation at the continued presence of his convalescent son. Oxford awaited, but that was not until October. In the meantime it was agreed that as soon as Bron was on his feet he should go abroad.

  Despite his enormous fame, both at home and in America, Evelyn was again beginning to feel poor. The tax burden in those days was punitive, and he could no longer afford more than a skeleton staff. He was depressed, sozzled, inactive, bored and looking forward to death. His children continued to irritate him – all, that is, except Meg. To her he wrote on Bron's return from hospital: ‘Darling Hog… Please marry someone very rich very soon, let him die, then you can set up house for me on a luxurious scale. I would not mind your having one daughter if she were like you. No sons please.’

  In November 1958 the War Office medical board pronounced Bron unfit for ‘any form of military service under existing standards’ and his commission was relinquished on 15 January. Shortly before his departure for France the famous photographer Mark Gerson came to Combe Florey to take pictures of the family. Evelyn insisted that Bron dress up in his Royal Horse Guards uniform for a picture but Bron, no longer a soldier, was reluctant to do so. A battle of wills ensued, which Evelyn won. I remember photographers coming to Combe Florey to take pictures of my father and his similarly insisting that I take part. I loathed doing so, but Papa could be quite demanding: ‘Look, you bugger, we have to keep the show on the road.’

  Evelyn thought Gerson's picture of Bron in his uniform dashing and sent copies of it to grand Catholic friends whose daughters, he hoped, might take a fancy to him. One of these was Lady Acton whose fourth daughter, Jill, seemed just the ticket: ‘How does Jill like the photograph of Cornet Waugh?’ Evelyn wrote. ‘He has just gone off today to the South of France. How I despise those who go there in summer.’

  Bron set out for France with eighty pounds in his pocket, planning to spend six glorious poolside weeks with some exceedingly rich Herbert cousins at their southern French villa at Valescure before moving on to his uncle Auberon's hilltop castle at Portofino in Italy. To his astonishment the Valescure millionaires decided to charge him for food, wine and restaurant meals. Within a few days he was forced to the sorry conclusion that he could no longer afford their hospitality. Uncle Auberon was not ready to receive him at Portofino so he set off instead for a lodging house in Bologna, which he remembered as being exceedingly cheap two years earlier. On arrival, with nothing to do and no money to spend, he decided to write a novel. Years later he thanked his stingy cousins for their parsimony without which he might never have launched his successful career.

  Bron's letters home from Bologna contain an even balance of extravagant sightseeing news and urgent requests for money. The tone is jocular, never timid. He told Evelyn that the novel he was working on was based on his experiences in hospital and Evelyn was at first delighted to hear that his son was making a serious attempt to join the family business. He had always hoped that Bron would become a writer and had urged him to have a book out by the time he was eighteen. The hospital mise-en-scène seemed a good one:

  My Dear Bron,

  Augustus Hare says of Bologna (in 1876) that it has ‘an agreeable society of well-informed resident nobility’. I trust that you have the entrée into these circles and are not alienating them by scattering matches on the floors of their palaces. Hare also says that all the beauties of the city may be seen in three days and he was not a hustler.

  So I imagine that you are occupied with writing. The theme of ‘operations’ is extremely popular with middle-aged literary subscribers, here and in the USA. I think a light treatment of your hospital experiences would find a publisher and a public…

  What Bron had not told his father was that his ‘hospital’ novel opened in a school – a Benedictine monastery school rather like Downside. When the news reached Evelyn he wrote immediately to Bron:

  I enclose a c
atechism. Your grandmother (on Harriet's authority I think) has told the monks at Downside that you are composing a diatribe against them. I am confident you are incapable of ingratitude to these patient and magnanimous men. Pray bear in mind that until you are 21 you cannot legally publish a book without my consent as you are incapable as a minor of signing a contract. I do not anticipate having to withhold my imprimatur. Your best course, I think, will be to have it typed and sent to Peters1 asking him to find a publisher without disclosing your name. It will be more gratifying to have it accepted on its own merits than on my, or my brother's, notoriety. As soon as it is accepted you can claim it and publish under your name.

  The best restaurant in Genoa is named Pichen.

  Your affec. papa

  Perhaps Evelyn's letter sounded more severe than he had intended. Bron wrote back to tell him that he was, anyway, losing heart. Evelyn returned with a postcard urging him to continue, finish the work and send it to his agent. The Downside problem was ‘not grave’, he assured him.

  More important to both Bron and Evelyn was the question of money. Evelyn worried about the cost of sending Bron to university, while Bron, who had taken to eating nasturtium leaves from public gardens, was desperate to survive the next three weeks until he joined his rich uncle at Portofino.

  Dear Bron,

  There used to be very comfortable charabancs with very polite drivers which stopped at cafés and restaurants and places of interest between Ravenna and Bologna but that was in the good days of Il Duce.

  I am told that £450 is not enough for an undergraduate. The President of Trinity told me £600 enabled a man to live as he and I did on £300. I went down deep in debt. I hope you wont. I will make up your total income to £650 for the next three years. If your pension goes down, my allowance will go up. I don't know whether the House will let you have your full £50 exhibition. If they do I will give you £284. I will also, of course, settle your current tailors’ bills. After October, unless for special emergencies, the £650 must suffice for all requisites and pleasures. You will not be charged for board here during the vacations but will have to pay for travel. It would be well worth your while to apply for the best rooms in college. I will advance you the Caution Money and Deposit (not out of your allowance). These sums should be repaid when the college repays them, for the education of your younger siblings.