Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  For many years after my father's death I continued to go to church faithfully every week. It was only when I came to accept that the services would be completely unrecognisable to him, that the new religion had nothing whatever to do with the church to which he had pledged his loyalty, that I felt I could distance myself…Whatever central truth survives lies outside the modern church, buried in the historical awareness of individual members. Or so it seems to me. But whenever I have doubts, it is my father's fury rather than divine retribution which I dread.

  Much fuss and comment arose from a passage in the foreword to God in which I recounted how Papa had offered to pay me the sum of my advance for the book if I would cease to work on it and decline to have it published. Perhaps he feared divine retribution or his father's fury, but I doubt either to be the case. As I wrote at the time, ‘He never asked what line the book was taking nor had he read a word of it and I never learned what lay behind his eccentric gesture.’ He believed that ‘man's relationship to God is an intensely private affair, the most intimate and personal of all his relationships’. It may be that he thought my snooping in the Almighty's pants drawer was vulgar, but I believe that the real reason he wanted me to abandon the book was that he thought I would cock it up. He never had much faith in his children's competence, always assuming that whatever new project they were embarked upon would end in catastrophe and disgrace. Had he lived to read God I am confident he would have been amused by it. Perhaps he would even have made space in his Daily Telegraph column to plug it.

  The bravery of his nepotism was stunning. When he believed that his children had done something well (and only then), he suffered no qualms or moral misgivings over the propriety of extolling their work in public. His paeans to his children often took poetic form. They were always sincere, and if the underlying emotion might have been one of relief that, for once, they had not botched things up, spontaneous pride usually overwhelmed it. For all his apparent detachment, for all his strong opinions, he was at heart a modest man for whom life's value was intrinsically bound to the welfare of his children. ‘The best monument one can leave nowadays,’ he wrote, ‘is a clutch of children who are not spoiled, over-supervised psychopaths. The time is surely past for building more lasting memorials than that, and we should concentrate on self-effacement.’

  Despite this long-term philosophy I do not doubt that, from time to time, the presence of his children depressed him as grievously as it had depressed his father, but he was better-mannered than Evelyn and made an effort to conceal his negative feelings. He never lost his temper with us, he was never in a rage, not even a mock one, and was never – well, hardly ever – sharp with us. No doubt he was often bored by our conversation, irritated by the physical presence of his boys especially, and exasperated by what he called the ‘plastification of Combe Florey’, which meant the strewing of toys around the house. Like his father he had a sensitive ear for language and recoiled from schoolyard jargon and solecisms of grammar but, unlike his father, he endured them all with muffled groans and saintly patience.

  At times he was visibly stunned by the fatuity of our remarks but, in kindness, was more inclined to blame our teachers than ourselves:

  British teachers, instead of filling their pupils’ heads with a lot of boring, out-dated rubbish about contraception, abortion, and how to masturbate, should teach each generation an entirely different language. Only those who wish to promote strife for their own sinister purposes can seriously pretend that there is anything to be gained by the generations talking to each other.

  More irritating to him than children were the modern, go-ahead parents who talked in quasi-cute tones to curry favour with their offspring. ‘Kiddie love’ that confronted him in every paper was a sure sign of the guilt parents felt for disliking their children intensely. ‘The English show their hatred of children by dressing them in hideous clothes called anoraks and romper suits, stuffing them with sweets, refusing to talk to them and sending them out of doors whenever possible in the pathetic hope that someone will murder them.’ He was allergic to the whole concept of ‘kids’.

  London children, or ‘kids’ as they are rudely called, have taken to crawling down sewers, where they could be overcome by lethal gases and pick up infections, according to the Thames Water Authority. Experts think the new craze is brought about by a children's television programme showing some mutant turtles who live in the sewers, apparently without harm to themselves. This explanation strikes me as unlikely. Children who watch television all day seldom have time to do exciting things like explore sewers. A possible explanation is that they are trying to escape from television, but I doubt that, too. The terrible thought occurs to me that if there were indeed a significant migration of London kids into the sewers, it could be the result of a dawning existential suspicion that this is their destiny, this is where they really belong.

  His boys were met with more disapproval, I think, than his girls – particularly at and after puberty. I greeted him and bade him goodnight with a kiss until I was twelve when suddenly, one night, he held his nose, stuck out his tummy and shook my hand instead.

  * * *

  Politically my father was neither left nor right wing, but was bored by politics and regarded all politicians with scorn. ‘That is my political creed so far as I have one,’ he said. After his attacks on the sloth and avarice of the industrial working class in the 1970s he was branded by many as a right-winger – even a fascist by some. Others saw his detestation of capital punishment, of harsh prison sentences, of war and of British isolationism as signs of inner left-wingery, but in truth he despised all positions, especially extreme ones: ‘I see nothing to choose between the National Front and the Race Relations Board,’ he wrote. ‘Both are a collection of bores and busybodies and both are harmful to the extent they are taken seriously.’ Socialism, he believed, impoverished not only the wealthy but also the poor that it was designed to enrich: ‘The trouble with socialism is that in the process of keeping the workers poor, oppressed and docile it must depart so far from its own sustaining rhetoric of liberty, equality, fraternity, prosperity and workers’ control as to create a psychotic society requiring mass imprisonment.’ Capitalism, on the other hand, was only marginally better, for it carried with it the seeds of its own destruction and led inevitably to a degraded world of ‘noise, smell, dirt and accompanying moral pollution’.

  A nation's prosperity is no longer measured by infant mortality, deaths in childbirth, incidence of rickets, deaths aggravated by malnutrition. These are so small as to be negligible. In a proletarian technological age prosperity is measured by numbers of motor boats, transistor radios, foreign holidays, hideous new accommodation for the working class and their recreational appetites. It is something to be regarded with abhorrence by the cultivated or reflective mind.

  I think his politics are best described by the term ‘liberal anarchist’, driven as they were by a conviction that all politicians are demented by Machttrieb – a manic desire to impose their decisions on other people. ‘Politics is for social and emotional misfits,’ he wrote, ‘handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.’ His faith in the political system was shattered early on. ‘The problem with democracy,’ he wrote, ‘is that it is not democracy at all but a zealotocracy or rule by enthusiasts. This is a polite way of saying that as many bossy people as possible get a chance to throw their weight around. It may be lovely for bossy people who like deciding how the rest of us should live, but it is hell for those at the receiving end.’ As political correspondent for the Spectator he spent many years observing politicians from the press gallery in the House of Commons, and it was from up there that he formed his views on political motivation.

  The yells and animal noises which the nation listens to on the radio programme Today in Parliament have nothing to do with disagreements about the way the countr
y should be run, or how much fuel should be given to old age pensioners at Christmas time. They are cries of pain and anger, mingled with hatred and envy, at the spectacle of another group exercising the ‘power’ which the first group covets; alternatively, they are cries of alarm as the group in ‘power’ sees its territory threatened. Old age pensioners are mad if they think anyone actually cares about their wretched coal.

  When a campaign was launched to make MPs put in longer hours he was furious: ‘The last thing we want from MPs is greater productivity. Since 1979 alone, they have passed enough footling and oppressive new laws to last a hundred years. They should be offered half the pay for half the hours, with an open invitation to go on strike for the rest of their natural lives.’

  I have dwelt at length with Papa's politics as I believe they go some way to explaining not only his philosophy of fatherhood but his philosophy of life. At its core was a hatred of bossing in all its manifestations. That is why, as a child, I was seldom if ever disciplined by him. He believed that good behaviour, particularly good manners, were taught by example and could never be learned from orders and instructions, or from any system of contrived or spontaneous punishment. All his instincts were geared to identifying bossing with a view to ridiculing and disobeying it. Once, walking into Westminster Abbey for a memorial service, his eyes alighted on a circular traffic-style notice – a picture of an ice-cream with a diagonal red line drawn through it. ‘Fascists!’ he said, as he walked past. If he had had time I am sure he would have doubled back to buy an ice-cream and lick it noisily during the service.

  When scootering by a river in France, he saw a sign proclaiming ‘Inderdiction formelle de jeter dans l'eau et sur ses dépendances des animaux morts (volailles comprises) et des ordures - Decret du 6-2-32 Art. 56’3 and immediately set off to find a dead animal.

  It had never occurred to me before that it might be fun to throw dead animals into the water but this notice, advertising a formal interdiction, could only be interpreted as an open invitation to join in what was presumably a traditional French sport. It was beyond reasonable hope that I would find a dead chicken or duck, but I remembered seeing a dead hedgehog on the road some miles back. Unfortunately it proved inseparable from the tarmac of which it had already begun to form a part, and it was while I was trying to run over a green lizard, the size of a small crocodile, that I fell off my Mobylette and suffered the sort of injuries which would cause any self-respecting British worker to draw sick benefit for a year.

  By following my father's anarchist lead and aping it studiously, I found myself frequently in hot water at school. Complaints about the injustices of schoolteachers were listened to sympathetically. In my second year I conceived the notion that a maths teacher was guilty of hiding samples of women's underwear in a locked cupboard in his classroom. Unable to force the doors I threw the whole cupboard down a flight of stairs in an effort to break it open and reveal his dirty secret. For this I was rusticated. Papa took the view that I had for once, shown bravery, skill and considerable enterprise, and wrote to the headmaster recommending that I be awarded school colours for my actions.

  Vandals are practically never caught and one seldom has the opportunity of hearing the vandals’ point of view. ‘Senseless’ is a word usually applied to these acts, but when one grasps the simple proposition that vandals obviously enjoy breaking things, then vandalism is no more senseless than playing tennis.

  When a chemistry master put down his pipette to give an impromptu speech on the evils of Private Eye Papa sent him a card with a hand-drawn eye on it and the warning ‘PRIVATE EYE IS WATCHING YOU’. I was encouraged to look out for signs of power mania in my teachers and, as soon as I spotted any, to denounce and despise them. This, on reflection, was counterproductive, and might have played some part in my poor academic record. Through Papa's eyes I came soon to the conclusion that all but a handful of the best teachers were enslaved to their Machttrieb and consequently treated the school, for the whole time I was there, as a battle turf on which to frustrate, insult and abuse them – not as a place of learning.

  Teachers live in a small world and their job is an unpleasant one. Among the few consolations it offers is an aura of semi-divine omniscience which enables them to patronise and feel important. This is what is threatened every time a pupil raises his hand with the correct answer. How pleasant it must be for a teacher, as he ignores the raised hands in front and approaches some bemused oaf in the back who hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about, to imagine he is making his contribution towards a fairer, more equal, society in the future.

  When I failed to get into Oxford University (dimness?) Papa didn't seem to mind in the least. He probably thought that a music degree was a footling waste of time anyway. I applied to New College, where Arthur Waugh had scraped his third in Greats, and was rebuffed after a single, rather silly interview with a thin man who liked only eighteenth-century French organ music. I missed nothing by going to Manchester instead, but felt a deep sense of shame at being the first Waugh in four generations to fail his Oxford entrance. After university, like all penniless ex-students, I needed to find a job. Papa tried to steer me from music with enticements to set me up as a wine merchant operating out of the cellars at Combe Florey and living at the end of his drive in the gatehouse. It was a similar offer, oddly enough, to that which the Brute had put to his son, Arthur, three generations earlier. I am confident that my father and I could not have worked together happily, any more than Arthur and the ‘son of his soul’ could get along at Chapman and Hall between 1919 and 1926. Papa once suggested that we collaborate on a musical, but I am glad I did it with my brother Nat instead. When Papa first took on the editorship of the Literary Review I supplied him with cartoon strips published, for some forgotten reason, under the nom de plume of Erin. I usually telephoned to discuss the content of each drawing before setting to work on it and when I proposed a hospital scene in which a wife gives birth to a two-headed baby he was delighted. Each head was to resemble one parent's face and the envisaged punchline was a picture of the father reaching across the maternity bed to knock one of the heads off with his fist. What Papa and I could not agree upon was whether it was funnier for the father to punch off the head that looked like his or the one that resembled his wife. I cannot remember which of us took which line, only that we squabbled over it like alley cats at full moon, that it was the worst and also the last cartoon I ever produced for him. It was at about this time that he kicked me out of his flat in London for leaving it in a mess.

  My brother Nat confused him utterly. His relationship with Papa was different from mine. He did not respect him in the grovelling way that I did but teased, cajoled and gave him silly names. In return for being called Nige, Bernie or whatever, Nat gave Papa ridiculous names of his own invention, Celtic Woman, Reggie the Stiff, Anus Buster – anything that came into his head, often very obscene. ‘You fail to convince me,’ Papa once said to him at dinner. ‘And you fail to convince me,’ Nat retorted. Papa looked bemused, and Nat walked over to him and, to everyone's amazement, gently rubbed his hands on the crown of Papa's bald head. ‘Quintus,’ he said, with a mock sigh and a honeyed tone, ‘we can't go on like this.’ Nat refused to treat Papa as anything other than an intimate object of affectionate mockery – a campaign strategy that was only partially successful.

  My brother is a very funny man. His humour is what you might call ‘off the wall’,‘zany’ – ‘lateral-thinking on boost’, as one observer described it. When the late Willie Rushton met Nat for the first time he said he had never encountered such comic genius since the early days of Peter Cook. From the moment he left school Nat decided to roam the world in search of adventure and he found plenty of it. He has starved in the Indian desert, contracted malaria in the Congo; he has been thrown into prison in Colombia, car-jacked in Nicaragua, had his heel bitten by a baby crocodile and his posterior shredded by the sharp teeth of the Komodo dragon. Adventure follows adventure wherever he goes. Recen
tly he found a lobster crawling across his garden in France, sixty miles from the sea. An ethnic guitar he brought back from South America as a present for his mother-in-law contained chagas larvae, which hatched into beetles, crawled out of the instrument, killed the dog and rendered his mother-in-law insane. I don't think there is a tropical disease left for him to catch. He has suffered them all with resilience, and continues to erupt periodically in blotches and sweats from ailments contracted in countries he visited many years ago.

  For a while Nat lived (doing what?) in El Salvador. He was impossibly hard to contact and my parents were in a permanent state of anxiety. Months went by without any answer to their letters sent on Nat's recommendation to ‘post-restante Santa Ana’, and the atmosphere at Combe Florey was pregnant with tension. Each time the telephone rang everyone raced towards it in the hope that it might bring news of Nat. On one occasion it was an unidentified Irish voice: ‘This is the IRA,’ he said. ‘We've rigged yer feckin’ house wit’ Semtex and it's gonna blow in twenty minutes.’ ‘Oh, fuck off,’ said my father, and hung up irritably. Another month passed and still no word. Then, as we were adjusting ourselves to the grimmest of all possibilities, a postcard arrived with an El Salvadorian stamp addressed to ‘BIG BRON BROWNING at Combe Florey House’:

  Happy Birthday Jacob,

  It doesn't seem so very long ago that we were celebrating your 35 down at Lowcombe Manor. The wine flowed a little too freely that evening. I will never forget how the light of Rogers fire played havoc with your profile. Yet despite these distractions you still found time to share some of your Tantric wisdom with yours truly, Gustav.

  Papa received the card with mixed emotions of dismay and delight. He was flummoxed and, with no details as to what ‘Gustav’ was doing, how he was faring or when he was planning to return, continued to fret for his safety. After several further months of unknowing he tried to lure Nat back with the promise of a flat in London, which, he said, if Nat returned by a given date, he would fill to the ceiling with foie gras. The message got through to whatever Borstal-prison Nat was sloughing in and his reply, addressed on the envelope to Amos ‘Aubs’ Waugh, was received at Combe Florey three weeks later: