Fathers and Sons Page 10

  Many little boys look on their fathers as heroically strong and skilful; mighty hunters, the masters of machines; not so I. Nor did I ever fear him. He was restless rather than active. His sedentary and cerebral occupations appeared ignominious to me in my early childhood. I should have better respected a soldier or a sailor like my uncles, or a man with some constructive hobby such as carpentry, a handyman; a man, even, who shaved with a cut-throat razor … I never saw him as anything but old, indeed, as decrepit.

  It may be true that in his first ten years he saw his father as a decrepit old bore, ‘a figure of minor importance and interest’, but it is also the case that he tried hard to win his approval. It was never going to be easy: anything that Evelyn could do Alec necessarily did better. In the areas of Arthur's keenest interest, cricket, literature and amateur dramatics, Evelyn stood no chance. When he was old enough to pick up a bat Alec, with five years’ advantage, could easily bowl him out and, more easily still, reduce him to tears by throwing the ball at his toys, at his rabbit hutch or at his head. In terms of literature and amateur dramatics Evelyn was again too far behind to impress. Alec had acted Hamlet before Evelyn had learned to walk. Arthur had taught his elder son to write poetry as soon as he could write prose. Night after night Arthur read aloud to Alec in his bedroom, praised his juvenile verses and pumped him full of enthusiasm for English literature.

  One subject, dear to Arthur's heart, in which Alec took no interest whatsoever, was religion and it was here that Evelyn thought himself able to establish a rapport with his father that would not be eclipsed by his older brother. Every morning Arthur led the family and servants in paterfamilial prayers in the dining room, just as the Brute had done a generation earlier and every Sunday the Waughs went en famille to church. Arthur could scarcely open his mouth but to quote from the King James Bible or from Cranmer's Common Prayer, but what Evelyn did not realise – maybe never realised – was that he had no hope on this front either for Arthur had long ago allied himself spiritually to Alec. All of his religious feelings were inextricably linked in his mind with ties of sentiment to Midsomer Norton, to the memory of his grandfather, the Reverend James Waugh, at Corsley rectory, and to his special love for his elder son. When Evelyn was three years old Arthur was already busy writing religious poems to Alec. Here is an example:

  ‘A Boy's Prayer’

  Holy, blessed Jesu,

  Life is very wide; Keep, oh keep a little boy

  Always by your side. In his work and playtime

  Wheresoe'er he be Teach him to do all things,

  Lord as unto thee.

  Written for dear Alec by his father (June xxix 1906)

  When not engaged in the composition of religious verse for his son, Arthur produced it by the yard for the local church. The vicar of St Augustine's, Kilburn, let him read it out during the service.

  To take the cross on our shoulders, to bear it with willing hand: To stand at its foot in the darkness on the trampled, desolate sod:

  To keep our twilight vigil as one of the little band, And to join our voice to the witness that this is the Son of God! For so, in the golden morning, we shall wind to the vacant tomb,

  We shall hear the angelic tribute to the Lamb that was sacrificed, And the stone of despair shall be rolled away from the sepulchre of doom,

  And we who have suffered with Jesus, shall be risen again with Christ!

  By 1913, when Alec was at Sherborne, Arthur, as we have seen, had come to believe that his eldest son was a gift to him from God and, every morning, he offered up prayers of thanksgiving for him. His religion centred around Jesus and the concept of love. ‘Love of the world finds its utterance in religion alone,’ he wrote. ‘The New Testament has the truest law of life. For it is the Gospel of Love; and Love is the only thing that counts. “He that hath Love, hath all,” said St John, when he was a very old man; and no man ever said a truer thing.’ Arthur's love for Alec and the imagined bonds of ‘nails that pierce through father and son’ magnified and intensified his religious zeal. I believe that he justified the intensity of his love for Alec by ascribing it to his Christianity. It is ironic that Arthur's letters to Alec should be far more religious than those he wrote to Evelyn and yet it was his younger son, not Alec, who early on showed such a keen interest in this subject.

  If Evelyn had hoped, as a youngster, to win his father's approval and to gain his attention by showing signs of religious fervour, he came, later on in life, to despise what he saw as Arthur's soppy, debased brand of Christianity. My own father felt the same about love-based Christianity: ‘From St John's revelation that God is love,’ he once wrote, ‘it has been a very short step to identify “love” with a state of vacuous euphoria involving an infantile dependence on group stimulation.’

  Whether wilfully, or subconsciously, Evelyn's early interest in religion helped him to feel a part of Arthur's world, not just an appendage to it. It also helped to ingratiate him with his Bible-bashing aunts at Midsomer Norton and enlivened Sunday mornings at home. Most of Arthur's male relations were priests. His grandfather and great-grandfather, two of his uncles and two of his first cousins were all Reverends Waugh. On K's side, too, his father-in-law and his brother-in-law were Reverends Raban. Many of Arthur's friends were priests as well (odd that Evelyn denied this in A Little Learning). One of them, the Reverend Kenneth McMaster, was his confidant and counsellor for forty years. Evelyn and Arthur shared their delight in the camp pulpit performances of another, the Reverend Basil Bourchier, who flashed an electric crucifix above the altar and threw salt at the congregation during his services at St Jude's, Hampstead Garden Suburb. K thought he was ridiculous.

  When Evelyn was twelve he set up a shrine in his bedroom at Underhill so that he could play at being a priest. He bought some incense and enlisted his aunts to make a frontal for his altar. Instead of the toys that normal boys asked for at Christmas, Evelyn requested that Aunt Elsie send him a crucifix and Aunt Trissie two brass bowls to fill with flowers. He spent many hours at his shrine emulating priestly actions in the flamboyant manner of Mr Bourchier. At Midsomer Norton in the holidays he learned to serve Holy Communion. Alec showed no interest in any of it.

  On 24 August 1916 Arthur celebrated his fiftieth birthday and Evelyn presented him with a very special present: a leatherbound volume, printed on hand-made paper, of a religious poem he had written. It was called ‘The World to Come; a Poem in Three Cantos’, modelled on Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius and composed in unrhymed trochaic tetrameters. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, ‘The World to Come’ tells of a soul's guided tour through heaven to the spot where God resides. Although in later life Evelyn claimed that ‘the existence of this work is shameful to me’, he was justly proud of it at the time. It was a fine effort for a boy of only twelve, full of puff and religious portent, ending with all the pitiful bathos of Paradiso:

  Cyprian bade me farewell, saying

  In a voice most sweet and tender:

  ‘Now my pleasant task is ended,

  We have travelled far together

  And have viewed all heaven's glory,

  But the time is now approaching

  When we pass on different missions,

  I to pilot wandering spirits,

  You to go before your Maker.

  Now farewell, your time approaches,’

  And I turned towards the entrance.

  Finis

  Arthur wrote to the Reverend Kenneth McMaster to trumpet Alec's success in a recent Sherborne mathematics exam and mentioned Evelyn's ‘most wonderful’ present. It was the first time that he had alluded to his younger son in nearly twelve years of regular correspondence with McMaster. ‘Not bad for a twelve year old,’ he wrote. ‘My poor wife sits in lonely sorrow at intervals wondering for what conceivable purpose she was made the instrument or vessel for bringing such creatures into the world. A turnip-faced clod-hopper she could have endured with pride. But these changelings of a distorted muse!’

  Arthur often
put his own ideas into his wife's head and I suspect that, in this case, it was he, and not K, who wondered at his purpose in bringing such creatures into the world. Whatever he thought of Evelyn's birthday poem he remained convinced that it was Alec among his sons, not Evelyn, who was destined for great things. In any case Alec's time for war was fast approaching and he might, within a year, be shot in the trenches. Arthur's eschatological concerns were not focused on Evelyn's Dante-esque picture of heaven, but on a posthumous rendezvous with the ‘son of his soul’. Often he told Alec, ‘You and I shall be able to communicate with one another in the afterlife.’ Evelyn's intrusions into this exclusive fantasy were as unwelcome as they were irrelevant.

  The idea to give Arthur such a glorious birthday present came to Evelyn after observing a similar gesture of Alec's only the year before. For Arthur's forty-ninth birthday Alec had given him a half-morocco bound volume containing the manuscripts of most of his best poems and inscribed it: ‘TO MY FATHER Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.’ Evelyn could not have failed to notice Arthur's puckered, emotional reaction to Alec's present and doubtless hoped for a similar response as he handed out his own effort a year later. But, alas, the effect could never have been the same. After seeing Alec's present, Arthur wrote: ‘My eyes were so full of tears when Alec gave it to me that I could not read a word. Whatever he has been in the world, Alec has at any rate been a devoted son to me.’2

  At home or at social gatherings Arthur gently teased his friends or, as Evelyn put it, subjected them to ‘genial ridicule’, but he was never malicious or cruel. Perhaps it was in mistaken emulation of this trait that Evelyn developed his sharp tongue. From an early age he enjoyed the effortless sense of superiority that emanated from his father and, whenever possible, joined with him in ridiculing others. In his diary for August 1914, the ten-year-old described a trip with Arthur to Bath. Architecture and history are of minor importance in this account:

  We would have had a nice journey down if it was not for the presence of a drunk man in our carriage who kept on making weird signs to his son who answered them with equally weird gesticulations. When we got out we went to the Roman Baths and had a grand time; there was an ass of a guide who showed the others round but Daddy and I did not, preferring our guide book to the repulsive look of that awful guide.

  Treats like this were rare, but on the few occasions when Arthur took Evelyn out he invariably impressed his son with his lavish and enthusiastic sense of occasion. On excursions to the Tower of London and St Albans Abbey, Evelyn remembered how he ‘gave lively explanations of all we saw, put himself on good terms with Beefeaters and vergers, tipped liberally, creating a little aura of importance about us that was lacking when my mother and I were out alone together’.

  If Arthur created for himself an aura of importance it was because, in his own jocular, actorish way, he felt that he was indeed important. He was proud to be a Waugh and engendered in both of his sons a fierce loyalty to the clan. He would frequently invoke the name in reproaching them: ‘No Waugh has ever done this before’, or ‘Your action is unworthy of the name of Waugh.’ He told his friends that he expected Alec to be a great success in life and to ‘give a new impulse to the family name’. And of course Alec did, though not as great an impulse as his younger brother gave it – but Alec was proud of Evelyn and, to his dying day, recognised him as a vastly superior writer. In 1951 he wrote to his mother: ‘Do you quite realise mother dear (I wonder if any of us do quite) how considerable a contribution Evelyn has made to the culture of his day, and how much honour he has brought to the name of Waugh?’

  I do not know if Arthur ever bothered to look up ‘waugh’ in the Oxford English Dictionary but if he had it did not seem to affect his passion for the name. As an adjective it is defined there as, ‘tasteless, insipid; unpleasant to the smell or taste, sickly, faint, weak, etc.’, and as a noun, ‘an exclamation indicating grief, indignation or the like. Now chiefly as attributed to N. American Indians and other savages.’ J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings and one time professor of English Language at Oxford, told my father that ‘waugh’ was the singular of Wales and effectively meant a single (no doubt sickly, insipid, etc.) Welsh person. Papa gleefully told this story to Diana, Princess of Wales, but to his dismay she didn't appear to understand it.

  In any event none of this was what ‘Waugh’ meant to Arthur. He looked upon the name with fierce and glowing pride, exhorting his sons to ‘reverence the past’ as they contemplated it. He spoke frequently to them of the ‘sentiment of blood which is perennially thicker than water’, ‘the ties of family’, ‘the imperishable passion of home’. On his finger he wore a fat gold signet ring stamped with the Waugh family crest – a wheatsheaf standing on a cushion with an apple stuck on the front or, to put it in the arcane vernacular of the heralds, ‘a garb or proper charged with a pomeis vert on a wreath of the liveries or and az’. Evelyn took an early interest in it, drawing and colouring the crest and escutcheon, complete with the Waugh family motto industria ditat (‘work enriches’), on letters and the backs of envelopes when he was eleven years old. By his bed at Underhill, next to a picture of a Peter Pan–Captain Hook duel, he hung a portrait of Alexander Waugh, the Great and Good, founder of the English Waugh family. The picture is entitled Dr Waugh and the Perverse Pupil, a sketch pulled from a temperance magazine, framed in plain wood moulded with crucifixes at each corner. Ponderous and bespectacled, Dr Waugh sits on a throne remonstrating with a bolshy student who is sucking his scarf and turning away. The story of how he brought this recalcitrant boy to his senses is told on the back. Evelyn was so taken by it that he recounted the tale, almost verbatim, in his early school play, Conversion.

  If Arthur Waugh was proud of his forebears I take my own pride in them for reasons that are unconnected with his. I have never liked the name Waugh, particularly in its anglicised pronunciation. It was originally a Celtic word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘outsider’, but by the eleventh century the Scots had started to apply it as a term of abuse to any member of the retinue of Alan FitzFaald (founder of the noble houses of Stewart and Howard), who had lately barged his way to Scotland from Wales. These unprepossessing invaders were dismissed by the natives as ‘walghs’ and showered, no doubt, with gob loads of Scottish phlegm each time the word was uttered. Over the centuries the name in its varied forms – Welsh, Welch, Walsh, Wallace and Waugh – came simply to mean a disagreeable Welshman. I wonder if Evelyn was thinking of his distant Waugh ancestors when he described the Welsh silver band's arrival at the Llanabba Castle sports day in his first novel, Decline and Fall:

  Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and moulting over their companions’ shoulders. ‘Crikey!’ said Philbrick. ‘Loonies! This is where I shoot.’

  Arthur's family pride did not extend to any connection with these moronic Celts, merely to his immediate forebears. But whereas Arthur was proud of his father for being a fine shot, a figure of note in Midsomer Norton and a trusted doctor, my own pride in the Brute rests solely in his invention of Waugh's Long Fine Dissecting Forceps. Nothing else about him appeals to me. Only in this single achievement do I take ghoulish delight.

  Similarly Arthur was proud of his grandfather, James Hay Waugh, for being rector of Corsley for forty-four years. In his autobiography he praises James Waugh's pulpit eloquence, and salutes him for teaching ‘all that is meant by family tradition and the love of a name’. But my own pride in James Hay Waugh has nothing to do with his rectorship at Corsley or his eloquence, or even his gifted viola-playing. After leaving Oxford he set up in
business with a younger brother, George, at 177 Regent Street, a chemist shop with exclusive rights to import the mineral waters of Vichy, Seltzer, Marienbad and Kissingen. But his fortune was made from his medicinal experiments. These included Waugh's Curry Powder, which is still available today – and delicious – Waugh's Lavender Spike, an ointment for aches and bruises, and Waugh's Family Antibilious Pills. It was this last invention that excites my pride the most. Made from soluble cayenne pepper in crystals, this wonder drug was singlehandedly responsible for curing Queen Victoria's wind. A letter to Waugh & Co. from Windsor Castle survives:

  Messrs Waugh,

  I beg leave to congratulate you on the result of so valuable a discovery, having no doubt that ultimately it will be generally approved of and preferred to any others, more especially by those men who may, through their professional pursuits, feel the necessity of judging impartially of the discovery in question.

  Please send me one dozen bottles for Her Majesty's Use. I sent today such as I generally send – BUT THEY PREFER YOURS.

  I am, Gentlemen, your obedient servant, A. Vilmet (Her Majesty's Purveyor at Windsor) Oct 8, 1849

  James Hay Waugh's success with Her Majesty's flatus was, alas, shortlived. After a few years he sold his share in the business to his brother and, in the fashion of his father (The Great and Good), entered upon a career in the Church. From his fart-pill profits he built himself a magnificent rectory at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, and when he left a few years later he generously donated it, with all its land, to the parish.