Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  Evelyn was convinced – correctly as it turned out – that his son's success would not be repeated. He was worried also that Bron would squander his money before paying tax on it and that his sudden fame would go straight to his head and ruin him. When a friend wrote to him in praise of the book Evelyn responded on a postcard: ‘I am most exhilarated that you enjoyed The Foxglove Saga. My first instinct was to send your letter to the author. Then reason intervened. I don't want him to get a swelled head or still less a swelled idea of his expectations. I enjoyed it too.’ Martin Stannard, in his often ponderous two-volume biography of Evelyn, claimed that Evelyn (who at this time felt his own creative powers were fading) was jealous of his son's success, but I can find no evidence to support this. He was delighted by the ‘undeserved’ success of The Foxglove Saga; he thought it was a very funny book; he helped to publicise it in the Daily Mail, to antagonise those critics who had insulted it and was demonstrably proud to be the father of its author. ‘I rejoice in your success,’ he wrote to Bron. ‘Regard it as a lucky win at gambling – not likely to be repeated. Think of your Uncle Alec who had a great success at your age and waited 40 years for another. But enjoy it to the full while you have it.’ In September he read the book for a second time with ‘enhanced enjoyment’.

  Evelyn recognised that the best passages in Foxglove were based on Bron's personal experience. Rashly, or perhaps typically for a first novelist, Bron had used all the experience he had – school, the army, hospital – in writing it and had left himself very little (other than a single inebriate year at Oxford) to draw upon for his next novel. To gain more experience for another novel Evelyn urged him to find an interesting job. Bron's natural enthusiasm for mendacity and subterfuge suggested the intelligence services – an area in which Evelyn had many useful contacts, not least his old drinking companion from Oxford, Roger Hollis, at that time the M of James Bond – head of MI5. The Waughs have, for three generations, maintained cordial links with the Secret Services, though we're not supposed to talk about them. Hollis arranged for Bron to meet Admiral Sir Charles Woodhouse at Carlton Gardens on 13 July. The interview, which was of an exploratory nature, went well enough and Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford and Bron's godfather, worked behind the scenes to advance his cause. A second series of interviews was proposed for September, by which stage Bron had arrogantly assumed that he was in. Evelyn wrote to him beforehand:

  You have an interview in London on 19 for your Foreign Office job. It is in fact the first of two days’ interviews… you will need to see your barber and rearrange your wardrobe. Frank Pakenham has been to great trouble on

  your behalf. He learns that at your first interview you made a generally favourable impression but the examiners feared that you might find the restraints of the service irksome. Hatty went to a party and was greeted at once with ‘we hear your brother is in the secret service’. It is important that you should refrain from boasting.

  Over the next three years Bron tried three times to join the intelligence services but was turned away on each occasion. It is surprising after so many rebuffs that he should have continued to help them on an ad hoc basis. One of his MI6 friends later told him that his efforts to join between 1960 and 1963 had been thwarted by Martin Dunne, an army associate who had been lampooned as a callous prig in The Foxglove Saga. Dunne's letter of reference had stated that, to his certain knowledge, Bron was unfit to join the service. The letter was dragged out of his file and held against him on each reapplication. Spurned by the intelligence services, Bron turned his talents reluctantly back to journalism.

  After his book was published Bron felt rich and set himself up as a dandy bachelor-about-town in a small but luxuriously panelled Edwardian apartment on Clarges Street in Mayfair. Determined to transform it into a ‘veritable palace’, he bought expensive pictures from the galleries in Bond Street, antiques, carpets and bibelots, writing excitedly to inform his father of all his latest purchases. He commissioned suits from Evelyn's tailors in Savile Row, dined at expensive restaurants, and at the weekends went shooting with grandees in the country.

  But the more money Bron earned, the more convinced Evelyn became that he was headed for bankruptcy. ‘After your 21st birthday,’ he wrote to him, ‘I shall not bore you with advice. Meanwhile I urge you to examine your surtax position. It is a deadly encumbrance to be in debt to the government. They always win. When you say that you will enjoy 70% of your present earnings, my heart quails for you. 30% seems a more probable figure. Have you consulted an accountant?’

  But Evelyn need not have worried: my father might have been a little eccentric in his financial affairs but he was also prudent. He was terrified of debt and, to my knowledge, never had an overdraft. The accumulated funds in his current account made him sublimely happy – so much so that he used to send me into Taunton to get a statement from the cashpoint machine so that he could gloat over it with a beatific smile and a glass of gin. He liked to carry large sums of cash around with him wherever he went. His wallet always had two or three hundred pounds in it.

  Throughout his life he was wary of financial advice, never buying stocks or shares, shunning Lloyds Insurance schemes, gilts, bonds and all forms of high-street usury. His only investments were in precious metal. Like a pirate of the sixteenth century he surrounded himself with great piles of gold and silver – kruger-rands, Maria-Theresa silver thalers and, at one time, a large box of solid silver ingots.

  When I was about ten years old I removed a bag of treasure from his library and buried it somewhere in the garden. It contained, if I remember correctly, around twenty silver coins of great antiquity. A week later I decided it would be fun to dig them up again but couldn't for the life of me remember where they were buried. I confessed tearfully, but Papa didn't seem to mind. Years later I took a metal detector to the area where I thought the treasure had been hidden and still could not find it. Perhaps one day someone will retrieve that hoard only to have it confiscated under the avaricious terms of Treasure Trove.

  Bron's enthusiasm for precious metal started with the Downside Numismatic Club and continued throughout his life. With his money from Foxglove he bought his first collection of solid silver bars. Evelyn thought it a sign of dementia. When he realised that Bron was never going to marry Lady Acton's daughter, Jill, he wrote to his friend to console her:

  I think Jill is well out of Bron. He is rather mad I think. His collar drawer is full of what look like slabs of chocolate in silver paper and are really bar silver. He has taken grand rooms in Clarges Street, goes shooting with the nobility and entertains extravagantly. Every time I see him

  he is wearing a new set of clothes. My beloved Margaret I see all too little… Also, I forgot to say, Brons teeth are black.

  Any lingering hopes that Bron might still be in line for a marriage to Jill Acton were finally dashed at the end of February 1961 when he surprised his family with a peremptory announcement of his engagement to Teresa Onslow. On hearing the news Evelyn wrote to Lady Acton, Jill's mother:

  Dearest Daphne,

  Hard tidings.

  My son, impatient at the curb put on his passion by Jill, has become engaged to a Protestant girl. I am very sorry it is not your dear daughter. Match-making must be postponed now unless you can make your eldest son marry my idiot daughter, Harriet. My non-idiot daughters both have their absurd affections engaged elsewhere. Perhaps the Maltese journalist would take idiot Hatty?

  Lady Acton's second son, the Maltese journalist, became professor of dogmatic theology at the Westminster Diocesan Seminary and never married. Hatty, on the other hand, married the American art critic Richard Dorment. Her eldest sister, Teresa, married an American academic (John D'Arms) and moved permanently to the United States in 1961. Meg, much to her father's chagrin, was married in 1962. Evelyn wrote, ‘Your sister Margaret has fallen deeply in love with a penniless stockbroker's clerk named FitzHerbert. He seems a pleasant young man. They will be married (I hope) without celebrations, but it is
hard to discourage the ambitions of brides.’ He did not want his ‘eye-apple’ to marry at all but realised that he could not easily forbid it. ‘She wants children,’ he wrote sadly, ‘and that is a thing I can't decently provide for her.’ Giles FitzHerbert, he believed, had ‘a rather common way with him’, an ‘oriental face’ and, he suspected, might be ‘some sort of crook’. He was twenty-seven, had taken a job in stockbroking on his engagement, but seemed to have done nothing much before that. Later he joined the diplomatic service and ended his career as British ambassador to Venezuela.

  Evelyn poured out his anguish at losing Meg in his last work of published fiction called Basil Seal Rides Again, a long short story about a fat, fifty-eight-year-old father conniving to thwart the marriage plans of his beloved daughter. His closest friends teased him about the semi-incestuous nature of his relationship with Meg. None could have failed to notice how Basil Seal's obsession with his daughter Babs had been drawn from real life:

  His daughter wore very tight, very short trousers, slippers and a thin jersey… Two arms embraced his neck and drew him down, an agile figure inclined over the protuberance of his starched shirt, a cheek was pressed to his and teeth tenderly nibbled the lobe of his ear… He disengaged himself and slapped her loudly on the behind.

  ‘I feel that with Meg I have exhausted my capacity for finding objects of love,’ he wrote, to Diana Cooper. ‘How does one exist without them? I haven't got the euphoria that makes old men chase tarts. My ghastly brother calls them “pipe lines” through which he is refuelled with youth. Not for me. Did I tell you my brother has written an autobiography in which he says: “Venus has been kind to me”?’

  Evelyn told his friends not to congratulate him on his acquisition of a son-in-law but on ‘my great beauty of character in surrendering my daughter to Fitz Giles’. Meg, for her part, tried to reassure him that her marriage to FitzHerbert would not alter their perfect relationship:

  I haven't really thanked you properly for being so kind about my engagement – you are the best father anyone can ever have had in the history of the world – really no flattery or sucking up – I think that. And there need be no divorce between us – I will come home just as often for weekends – Giles won't mind.

  Meanwhile James, who was studying at the grim Catholic monastery school of Stonyhurst, was told by his father to become a Catholic priest. He refused and was instructed to join the army instead. When he wrote to Evelyn begging to be allowed to go to Oxford, he was branded by his father as a ‘coward’ and a ‘disgrace’ – ‘My son James is a thorn. Won't go into the church or the army, smokes cigarettes and can't take his hands out of his pockets. My youngest son is a jewel but I suspect he will grow up homosexual.’ In a similar round-up of his sons to another correspondent Evelyn wrote: ‘My youngest son is a saint, my second son a dutiful bore, my eldest son was a fiend at puberty but lately much improved in character.’

  If Evelyn had a snobbish bone in his body, which maybe he had, he should have been pleased that his future daughter-in-law, Teresa Onslow, though not of the Catholic faith, was blue-blooded. She was the daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow and directly descended from more British monarchs than George VI, who was King of England at the time of her birth, but due to the speed of their engagement Evelyn hardly knew her. In a letter to his publisher he bewailed: ‘It is distressing that my son should think of marriage at an age when he should give himself to the education of a femme du monde de quarante ans, but, as you remark, in the age of miscegenation it is agreeable that he should have chosen a consort of his own class.’

  Teresa Onslow had visited Combe Florey only once before Bron announced his intention to marry her. On that occasion Evelyn had taken an instant liking to her. She was humorous, sharp and unafraid of him. At dinner on her first night Bron had casually turned to his father: ‘Papa, do you like Penelope Betjeman?’

  ‘If you are asking me if I have fucked her, the answer is “yes”.’

  Teresa was unfazed by her future father-in-law's eccentricity and Evelyn admired her all the more for it.

  The first Evelyn and Laura heard of Bron's marriage plans arrived by letter on 21 February:

  Dear Mummy and Papa,

  I wondered if I might return this week-end to Combe

  Florey, although I am afraid it will be a fleeting visit, to arrive on the Saturday and leave on the Sunday.

  I would like to discuss with you a plan about which I am afraid you may have misgivings, to say the least. I propose, despite my extreme youth, and my uncertain and at times irresponsible temperament on which it has been your painful duty from time to time to remark,4 to take a wife and marry her.

  I am terribly sorry to be doing something which might incur your displeasure. I only ask that you accept the matter and, if you can, give us your blessing. I am well aware of all the objections to the step, and I respect them. From being an elegant and well-to-do bachelor whose irresponsibility can only harm himself I shall be a poor married man, in the prime of his life, committed to a life of hard work and staid behaviour with a wife and family to support. I can only hope and pray that all will be well.

  Teresa Onslow, whom I love, has said she will become my wife and submit to instruction from the Church.5 Her mother has agreed. Although she has not much money, she has some. My own income as you know, amounts to £1600 p.a. of which £450 is tax free. Although very poor we shall not be grotesquely poor, and this figure does not include any sums I may earn from time to time writing books or other things.

  I know that you will counsel delay, but my mind is certain, and living so close in London and seeing her so often, a long engagement would become a farce. In any case the life of a rich bachelor, although seemingly enjoyable and sensible, is really awfully pointless and selfish and mean. Although extremely young I do not think that celibate existence has many more surprises, lessons or pleasures for me. I am extremely lucky to have such a charming and

  lovely girl fond of me, and feel confident it would not happen again. My hair and teeth are falling fast, and if I do not marry soon I shall have to be content with Miss Catcheside.6

  … I shall live in Islington in an old but spacious house. Please take it seriously.

  Lady Onslow s address is at 47 Chester Row, SW1. I should like to announce the wedding after I have seen you next week-end, or it might out, and the final disgrace of all is to see it in Wm Hickey before it has appeared in The Times.

  Please do not be distressed by it all.

  With love from Bron

  Laura replied by return:

  Darling Bron,

  Well you could knock me down with a feather. By all means come this weekend, as early as you can Saturday. Car or train?

  I will attempt to cook you some good meals –

  All my love Mother

  The sharpest embarrassment of any marriage arrangement is often centred on the pre-nuptial meetings of in-laws. Bron told his father that he need not bother to see Lord Onslow but Evelyn wrote to him anyway to explain that his daughter was making an imprudent choice in marrying his penniless, irresponsible and slightly mad son. Lord Onslow replied:

  Dear Evelyn,

  Many thanks for your very kind letter. If I may say so, I found your son a most charming young man and I feel that in this changing world one should not obstruct the young in a matter such as this.

  Money certainly ‘oils the wheels’ but it is not everything. That they should be happy long after we are dead is all that matters. I do not think I need bother you to come to London – but next time you are up we might meet together especially as I have not seen you for a long time.

  Yours Arthur

  Evelyn bridled when anyone but his closest friends called him by his Christian name and he thought it odd of Lord Onslow (whom he hardly knew) to call him ‘Evelyn’ in lieu of ‘Mr Waugh’. His eldest daughter's wedding to John D'Arms took place on 3 June 1961; Bron and Teresa's less than a month later on 1 July. Evelyn stipulated, ‘Neither Teresa nor
the young American shall call me Evelyn.’ His first meeting with Bron's future mother-in-law, Lady Onslow, was not a success. Bron had written in advance to warn his father:

  Dear Papa,

  I hope you enjoy your luncheon with Lady Onslow. It is very kind of you to put yourself to all this trouble. You will find her a nervous woman, but not unintelligent. I should say that it is a great sorrow to her that her daughter is marrying a Catholic, although she is determined not to influence her in any way in the matter. Please make it quite plain to Lady O that you have absolutely no capital at all. I have told her, and she realises it, but is advised by some lunatic lawyers or relations that you must, and suspects, I think, that you have been keeping me in ignorance of it. Lord Onslow is exceedingly genial about the whole affair.

  Evelyn and Lady Onslow met for lunch at the Ritz Hotel. Both were early. He found her ‘nervously and unreasoningly anti-Catholic’; afterwards she turned up several times at Combe Florey. ‘I returned rather travel worn to find Pamela Onslow installed here – not refreshing.’ At the time of her daughter's wedding she was in a jittery state, behaving badly about money, rude about and to Bron. Evelyn objected to her receiving telephone calls at midnight. Bron wrote nervously to his father: ‘I hope the Pamela visit was not too disastrous – she is scarcely sane, I am afraid. If she tries to come and live with us I shall poison her (secret).’

  Two weddings within a month were more than Evelyn could bear. ‘My life at the moment is hideously overshadowed and agitated by weddings. I have a daughter marrying a studious and penniless Yank in a fortnight and, hard on that, a son marrying a pretty, well endowed English girl. But the turmoil and expense are damnable.’ His daughter Teresa was married in Taunton, near to Combe Florey, so he could hardly avoid it. Bron's wedding was to take place in London with a reception afterwards at the House of Lords – this Evelyn hoped to miss. Ideally he would have liked both weddings over and done with as a single event: