Fathers and Sons Read online

  Under George Waugh's sole management, the chemist's in Regent Street earned a great fortune. George became a property developer and two of his daughters married, in succession, the pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, while a third married the sculptor Thomas Woolner.

  Arthur never mentioned his grandfather's experiments in chemistry. In general he looked down on science and on scientists. The higher intellect, he argued, is interested in literature and ‘ideas’.

  Scientists, in their mad scramble for facts, are spiritually inert, for ‘science’, he once said, ‘has ridden roughshod over the world and is now found to have effected absolutely nothing in the service of the soul of man’. Evelyn inherited this opinion, which passed, in refined variants, down through three generations of Arthur's descendants. My father was more contemptuous of scientists even than Arthur, mainly because he did not believe any of their claims. He did not accept, for instance, that man had landed on the moon in 1969, or that light travelled: as far as he was concerned its movement was instantaneous. Computers, he argued, did not work:

  They spend a large part of the time frozen, crashed out or in remission, unusable in any way and liable to wipe out all the information they have been given. This misbehaviour is not the result of user-error, but simply a question of mood. One can live a happy and fulfilled life without having anything to do with these machines, which grow more unpleasant and threatening every day.

  At Lancing Evelyn took a vehement dislike to his science master, carrying Arthur's science-versus-literature battle from the dining-table at Underhill into his classroom. A letter home, dated 29 February 1920, would, he hoped, win his father's favour:

  My chief activity at the moment is a guerrilla warfare with Treble, the science master. We simply hate each other and spend the whole time trying to score off each other. I am about three up still, although I got detention for impertinence yesterday. My latest piece of hubris is to write my science essay in blank verse. I don't think he will spot it as I have written it as prose and he is most illiterate. Here's a sample:

  This figure shows the apparatus used For making oxygen. The flask is held Upon a tripod and on wire gauze At B, and heated by the flame of C,

  A Bunsen burner, and a long glass tube Convey the gas down to the water trough, Which, bubbling through the water, fills the jar At E. The piece of rubber tube at F, Is there to disconnect the tube and flask, That when the air contracts as it grows cold, It does not suck the water up the tube Nor break the flask.

  Please don't think that I am on the road to ruin. All other masters will give an excellent report of my conduct and hard work. This is really done more out of curiosity than anything to see if he can spot it. I doubt that he would notice it even if it were in rhyming hexameters.

  Today I am opposing ‘This house approves of the education of the masses’ in the morning, reading a paper on ‘Humour in Art’ in the afternoon, and probably speaking in the school debate on ‘This house considers that curiosity is the best trait in human character’ in the evening. Quite busy.

  Please don't get frightened about Treble. I know when to stop, and he is a very contemptible little man. I had another lesson in script from Crease on Thursday. I am really learning an awful lot from him.

  Your prodigal son, Evelyn

  Evelyn's attempts to curry Arthur's support in his scraps with schoolmasters were never successful. Neither did he make any headway in his bold efforts to set those masters he did actually like against his father. ‘Terrible man, my father,’ he told a teacher at Heath Mount. ‘He likes Kipling.’ To his tutor at Lancing Evelyn frequently referred to his father and brother as ‘the Philistines’ until this got back to Arthur and greatly upset him. In general Arthur would not support either of his sons in their rebellion against authority. If he was disapproving of the insolent assault on Mr Treble he was even more distressed to discover that Evelyn had taken to slipping out of the school grounds late at night to walk by the sea with a friend from another house. At first Arthur panicked, fearing that Evelyn, like Alec before him, had taken to homosexualising with younger boys that would be the cause of another devastating Waugh scandal. Evelyn never knew of his brother's disgrace at Sherborne until he read of it in Alec's memoirs in 1962 for the secret had been closely guarded. His seaside escapades were entirely innocent, but Arthur wrote in desperate tones. Evelyn's nonchalant response was recorded in his diary:

  We were just going down to Shoreham to get some wine when I got a frenzied letter from Father who has heard about my going out. He was quite unconvincingly rhetorical about it and threatened to take me away if I didn't promise never to do it again. I think he is absurd, but I am rather glad he has taken a strong line about something at last.

  Arthur's original letter is preserved in the British Library:

  My dearest Evelyn,

  Mother and I had a sickening shock when we learned this evening that you are making a practice of escaping from the house and going down to the seashore at night. It is years since we have heard anything that has so disturbed us. That you, a House Captain, in the confidence of your leaders, should play such a rotten and contemptible game. It is unworthy of the name of Waugh and doubly unworthy of yourself of whom we have always been so proud.

  I cant threaten my own sons. I never have. I can only appeal to them. When Alec told me this sort of thing was going on at Sherborne, I asked him for his word of honour that he would never do it. He gave me that word and he kept it. I appeal to you to send me by the first post your honourable assurance that never again will you break bounds, never go out at night, never do anything so fatuously

  foolish to endanger your whole future. If you give me that word, I know you will keep it up. If you do not give it I shall take my own steps even if it be to the entire upsetting of your future career. I cannot have a son of mine betraying his trust and be privy to his conduct.

  Evelyn, I did not think it of you. Mother did not think it of you. We are deeply hurt and humiliated. I beg you to write and give us your promise. I feel sure you will. It can only be thoughtlessness that has led you into such an entirely silly, vain and purposeless display.

  Please write by return and restore yourself to the confidence of your loving Mother and Father.

  It was typical of Arthur to invoke Alec's good example in reprimanding Evelyn, and, in this case, it was also dishonest. When Alec saw part of this letter reprinted in Evelyn's autobiography in 1964 he wrote to his brother: ‘I was surprised by our father's outburst about your nocturnal excursions at Lancing. I never considered breaking out at night at Sherborne and I don't remember my father ever having discussed it with me, certainly not having extorted a promise from me.’

  Evelyn's relationship with Arthur deteriorated sharply while he was at Lancing. The Treble letter was exceptionally detailed and jocose; maybe because he wanted something out of Arthur, it starts: ‘I am out of money. Could you send me a few pennies, do you think? The cost of living is very high now that the grubber has started having cream buns and eclairs.’ In general, when he was not appealing for funds, his weekly letters home were dutiful, uninformative, disengaged and often negative in tone: ‘Work goes fairly well but running rather depressingly. I am afraid I have little hope of getting in the team. All the people who had flu last year will be running this time’; ‘Is there any merit in these verses? They are a bit sentimental I am afraid. I don't think the first verse is bad, is it?’ Perhaps fearing that his father would take less interest in his achievements than he had in Alec's at Sherborne Evelyn deliberately played everything down. Even when he won the Scarlyn Prize for Literature his tone was studiedly disinterested:

  Dear Father,

  I've got the Scarlyn, all right. It was put up yesterday. It hardly seemed worth writing as it wouldn't go before tomorrow. I am a little cheered. Of course it is no testimony to my brain – there was no serious competition.

  Arthur was irritated by Evelyn's disaffected attitude. In One Man's Road, he recalled, ‘
Alec was up to his neck in the life of Sherborne. Evelyn, on the other hand, took the routine of his school in a sort of negligent stride. He did what was required of him but he did it without relish or genuine interest.’ In response to one particularly aloof effort from his younger son, Arthur reprimanded him:

  Dear Evelyn,

  Many thanks for your letter which had been eagerly looked forward to. The art of correspondence will be found, upon a study of the examples left us by the greatest masters, to consist not so much of rigid communication of facts, as in the exchange of views and sentiments between those who are united by a mutual sympathy. Lovers do not communicate many facts, but their mutual interchange of notions and emotions, revealing the hidden springs of life and character, have undeniably afforded them infinite satisfaction and will continue to do so as long as ink and paper survive.

  The excitement and intense involvement that Arthur had shown over Alec's school career did not exist for Evelyn at Lancing. Until his last year Evelyn never asked friends to stay in the holidays. With Alec there had been a continuous stream of masters and boys from Sherborne visiting Underhill in the holidays. Many years later, Evelyn felt guilty about this: ‘Young friends were a necessary requirement of my father's well being, and I did not provide them.’ He knew that Arthur lacked the sense of identity with himself that he had shared with Alec at school. His recollection for the Sunday Telegraph in 1962 is a little sad:

  My brother was a zestful schoolboy and my father shared all his enthusiasms. He would have liked to do the same with me, but my school was less conveniently placed for visiting [sic] and the hard times of the First World War made hospitality difficult. Moreover I was not a zestful schoolboy. After my first two years I was not unhappy but I had few enthusiasms to impart. I was reticent, wrote dutifully once a week but seldom sought sympathy or advice. It was a disappointment to him that he did not get from me the renewal of youth which my brother had injected.

  In his late years Alec admitted that his father's favouritism had given him a superiority complex. ‘I was confident that I was going to make a considerable mark in the world. Evelyn may well have felt himself relegated to second place.’ In an unpublished manuscript, entitled ‘My Childhood’, he had written: ‘For my first five and quarter years I was an only child, and I remained an only child to all practical purposes right through my childhood, my brother Evelyn being in those early days no more than an encumbrance in a corner. My childhood centred round my father.’

  At the end of his life Alec went sombrely through his papers, sorting manuscripts and letters into batches. Those from his father he tied neatly together with string and appended to them in his tiny, spindly handwriting, a note of explanation:

  I feel that these are some of the most remarkable letters ever written from a father to a son. There are those who may feel that they are too personal to be read outside the family and that they should have been destroyed. After very careful thought I feel that my father would like them to have been preserved and I think that they will be of some interest to the student. I believe that my brother Evelyn will be an object

  of public interest for many years, and the compiler of a thesis will surely be aided by an insight into his father's character. No equivalent relationship existed between my brother and my father, and the fact there was no such relationship may provide a clue to my brother's complex character. I do not see how any one could read these letters without realising what a wonderful father I had.

  A.W. 1970

  26Evelyn's friend Ernest Hooper entered Sherborne in the spring of 1917. For spying he was awarded an OBE. He ended his career as commissioner of Chinese Customs.

  27Evelyn had his revenge fifty years later when he wrote to Alec to inform him that ‘some lunatic’ had offered sixty guineas for a copy of The World to Come. Did Alec still have a copy? If so, he could make money, too.

  V

  Out in the Cold

  In August 1914 Alec, like most of the boys in his class at Sherborne, had been eager to leave school in order to fight the Germans, but within a year the war had emptied out the place, and the list of pupils and masters killed in the conflict was growing weekly. Arthur kept a weary eye on them and reported the latest in letters to his friend Kenneth McMaster:

  Do you remember Cornish – the Sherborne boy with a smile – whom you liked at the station? He is shot once through the left hand and three times through the right arm and has no sensation or movement in his right hand at all. And Jack Woodthorpe has lost an eye and a part of his jaw is shot away: and I know not how many friends are gone altogether beyond the reach of the enemy's hate. And this is the glorious war which was to end at Xmas 1914.

  Two weeks later the son of another of Arthur's priestly friends, who was chaplain at Sherborne school, was shot dead leading a valiant charge from a trench in Northern France. Arthur sent his grieving father a poem, from which I quote the first verse:

  Bright be the morning sun, Dear Boy,

  Bright as your happy parents’ joy,

  That sees you gathered and enrolled

  In the Good Shepherd's guarded fold, Where, freed from fear, and safe from harm,

  He holds his lambs within his arm.

  By the end of his last term, in the summer of 1915, Alec was no longer convinced of the glories of war – in fact, he was dreading the prospect of an army career. He, too, looked at the lists in dismay, convinced that the name of Alec Waugh would soon be up there among those of the fallen. Little did he know then that, within twenty months, nineteen of the forty-one boys with whom he had enrolled at Sherborne in the third term of 1911 would have been killed in action.

  When the headmaster refused to have Alec back for the winter term of 1915 he might as well have pronounced a death sentence on him for he had no other option than to join the army. On 8 September Alec went into training, first at Lincoln's Inn OTC for two weeks and from there to a camp at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. He hated the gruelling routine of long marches, meagre food and sleep deprivation. By August he had severed ties with Davies mi. ‘He can never lie in my heart again,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘“dead and forgotten as last year's flowers and all sweet things that have had their day”. I have never risen to such heights as I did with him. He was my pilot star. But the passion is dead now.’ Later he was to discover, to his great distress, that Davies had only canoodled with him in the first place because he was on the rebound from another boy: ‘So he chucked Taylor1 and thought that to make up he would let me kiss him and so that was the only reason of what I have considered so great a triumph. Afterwards, however, he said he actually got rather keen on me. Which only proves that he is a bigger ass than I thought him to be.’

  Alec had never told Arthur of his love for Davies Minor. These things were kept secret, strictly concealed in the ‘watertight compartments’ that he had described in Public School Life. In 1919 he gave his brother instructions in the chameleon art of separating home and school life. Evelyn was impressed by the whole ‘watertight’ concept, confiding to his diary on 23 September: ‘Alec once said that he kept his life in ‘watertight compartments’. It is very true; here I am flung suddenly into an entirely different world, different friends, and a different mode of life. All the comforts of home are gone but one doesn't really miss them much.’ In his fragment of an unfinished novel, written a year later, Evelyn included a character, Ralf, who was based on Alec: ‘One of the awfully clever things that Ralf had said was that life should be divided into watertight compartments and that no group of friends or manner of living should be allowed to encroach upon any other.’

  Evelyn tried to emulate Alec's ‘awfully clever’ example but his own watertight compartments were prone to leak. When he started at Lancing in 1917 he was proud of his family. He allowed his friends to send their English essays to Underhill for Arthur to mark, and invited his father and brother to address the Lancing College Literary Society, but after a while, as he started to integrate with the life of the school, he cho
se to keep family and friends apart. For one thing, Arthur was too interfering: he always wanted to be best friends with his sons’ best friends. He would show off with them, woo them with his charm, stay up late talking to them, reading them poetry or extracts of Dickens after dinner, and hogging the conversation at table. In effect he stole them for himself.

  Dudley Carew, a close Lancing friend of Evelyn's, came to stay at Underhill and noted in his diary: ‘The books and rooms are in such perfect taste and I can truthfully say I've never enjoyed myself anywhere else half so much and I think I made one complete conquest – Arthur.’ He was so impressed by the old man that he prayed Evelyn might one day ‘grow into the comfortable image of his father’. Afterwards he started a private correspondence with Arthur and before long he was asked to Underhill at Arthur's invitation rather than Evelyn's. In some ways Arthur seems to have preferred him to Evelyn. In a twenty-first-birthday letter to Carew he made a pointed comparison with his younger son: ‘With all my heart I wish you all good things; what is more I am confident that you will attain them. You are not afraid to work and you realise that without work there are no prizes. You do not despise the things that matter or speak cynically of character…’ Many years later Carew wrote, ‘I was so attached to Arthur that it is hard to be objective about him.’ Evelyn, not unnaturally, dropped him as a friend. In a letter to a friend after Evelyn's death Carew wrote of the end of his friendship: ‘I realised that it was inevitable. I had been too close to him, too close to Underhill and to his parents, Arthur especially.’

  On the rare occasions when his friends came to Underhill, Evelyn did his best to steer them away from his father. Dudley Carew recalled how he loved listening to Arthur telling stories. As he sat in the book-room awestruck by Arthur's stream-of-consciousness monologue, Evelyn became restive: