Fathers and Sons Read online

  Through Gosse's patronage Arthur soon found ways to turn an honest penny on the London literary scene. He started off as a humble publisher's reader, with a few magazine short stories and poems to his name, but by the time of the Brute's death in December 1906, he was a plumping, reasonably well-off married man with two sons, living in a modest terraced house in North London. He had written one bestseller – the first biography of Tennyson – and had contributed an important article to the inaugural edition of that scandalous organ the Yellow Book. He was an established critic and literary editor, a poet of small repute, the London correspondent to an influential New York newspaper and managing director of Chapman and Hall, a respected London publisher whose principal revenue derived from its exclusive copyright tenure on the works of Charles Dickens. If Arthur was not exactly famous he was known to all in the highest literary circles of his day.

  I am sure the Brute, in his own way, was proud of all this but, alas, I have no record to substantiate the claim. Shortly after his sixty-sixth birthday he came down with a nasty flu, but continued to shoot pheasants and to minister to his patients in spite of it. Sneezing filth all over them was no doubt recognised as sloppy doctoring even in those far-off days, but somehow this particular show of obstinacy has since been interpreted by generations of Waughs as a singular example of the Brute's integrity and dedication to duty. History does not record if he spread the infection among his patients, only that he got worse and worse until his flu had turned into full-blown pneumonia. It was some time before his wife and daughters realised the danger he was in. Arthur was telegraphed in the middle of the night and on the next morning took a train from London to Bath, whence he was driven by horse-drawn cart at breakneck pace through a blizzard across the snow-and ice-covered Mendip Hills. By the time he reached Midsomer Norton the Brute was already dead.

  The funeral was well attended. The Brute's coffin was borne on the shoulders of six of his old retainers – those who, no doubt, hated him – to a waiting cart. From there it was pulled a quarter of a mile to the new cemetery and laid to rest above the coffin of his sailor son – the flogger, in perpetuum, on top of the flogged.

  In his autobiography Arthur recorded the death of his father without emotion: he hadn't particularly liked him. The will wasn't signed and the Brute's finances were all of a mess. Fifteen months later, Arthur's mother died: ‘As I stood by her open grave I knew that I was burying with her the last associations of my childhood: that the light of the old home was extinguished for ever, and that I must look elsewhere, during the rest of my life, for the inspiration and the hope that keep the heart young in the midst of change and decay.’

  6Papa disqualified the first Thomas Waugh (1632–93) from this list on the grounds that ‘all good pedigrees must begin with Adam’.

  7His father-in-law (my maternal grandfather) of whom he was extremely fond.

  8For those who do not understand cricket this means that Arthur had a bad eye for the ball.

  III

  Golden Boy

  In 1908, at the time of his mother's death, Arthur was middle-aged. His waist had started to spread – due, in the main, to his uncontrolled passion for bread and butter; he was partially deaf in one ear and his hair was turning grey. His publishing and writing careers were moderately successful but static. Although he had succeeded, by prudent management, in pulling Chapman and Hall from a financial slump, he remained terrified of shareholders’ meetings and regarded the recruitment of authors as a passive occupation. Manuscripts were sent to him: he read them and decided yea or nay at his office desk; he was not active in creating a list and, in consequence, many of the best writers of his day fell into the hands of his rivals. After work he returned home, where he would not discuss business matters.

  He did not enjoy parties, nor did he invite many of the famous authors of his acquaintance to his home. He continued to attend Edmund Gosse's grand literary dinners, leaving his house under duress but invariably returning in good cheer. ‘A capital evening!’ he would say. When he was tipsy and in high spirits everything was ‘capital’ – ‘capital fellow, capital lunch’. Despite his shyness in company he was lively, trusted and popular.

  At home his verbosity was inclined to run away with him and, like his father, Arthur could not resist spouting quotations from literature, the Bible or hymnody to embellish the finer points of his conversation. Despite his recurrent asthma, for which he bought himself Himrods Mentholated Cure, he continued to smoke pipes until the end of his life so that the smell of his home and office comprised a distinctive mixture of these two ingredients. He had a large collection of pipes, which he cleaned ceremoniously at the kitchen table.

  In 1907, from his share of the Brute's estate, Arthur had built himself a plain suburban villa in the deco style in Hampstead, North London, and named it ‘Underhill’ after a lane at Midsomer Norton where he had walked with his mother and first kissed his future wife. It was erected on a green site just outside what was then Hampstead village. In the years that followed, the Underground arrived and every spare patch of grass was built upon. Then the house was officiously numbered by the postman, 145 North End Road, and the area lost its rural charm as it merged with the new developments of Golders Green, to become a typical suburb of the bustling metropolis. The house was architecturally plain but to Arthur – who had followed its progress from the foundations upwards and who, as the years went by, had added to and extended the building and its gardens – Underhill remained a magical hearth that replaced in his imagination the obstinate fantasy of Mother and Midsomer Norton. ‘No doubt it was never anything more than an ordinary suburban villa,’ he wrote, ‘but it was a great deal more to me.’ He loved it with a passion and he loved it all the more because he had supervised its creation. He wrote, in the Quarterly: ‘As the home rises, brick upon brick, from its broad concrete and trenches to its comely rough-cast chimney stacks, every stick and stone of it has its own association. You even remember upon what day, and under what complexion of sky, each pleasant finishing touch was given. Here is the real sense of possession. However small the tenement, it is at least all yours.’ When he was away from Underhill he would wail in mock lamentation:

  ‘Hame, hame, hame, O hame fain would I be

  -O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree…’

  Built on three floors and set in large gardens, Underhill was designed to be light and airy. Instead of a conventional drawing room, Arthur had insisted on an oak library, which he called the ‘book-room’, with french windows leading into the garden. It was here that he read to his family after dinner. The great fault of the house was that it had only one bathroom, on the first floor. Who was to use it first each evening became a frequent cause of family friction. I am told that most middle-class families had only one bathroom in those days. Can this be true?

  Arthur described the house as ‘old’ even though it was new – for he attached this epithet to things that he loved without discrimination for their age. By ‘old’ he meant ‘cosy and endearing’. He referred to Underhill's ‘stout old timbers’ as though it were a ship. Following an unseemly battle with his sisters over the ownership of some family portraits at Midsomer Norton, which he lost, Underhill was decorated mainly with prints and signed photographs of famous authors. The furniture was solid English oak – ‘not disreputable’, as Evelyn used to say.

  Underhill today is divided into three flats. Arthur's extensive gardens have long since been redeveloped – to the left a brand new house; to the right and behind, a ‘drive-thru’ car wash proclaims with a gaudy sign: ‘Woodstock Motors Handwashing and Valet Centre. While-u-wait service.’

  In 1893 Arthur married my great-grandmother Catherine Raban (whom he always called K1 ) after a long engagement attenuated by unnecessary insecurities over money and a reluctance on her part (I think) to commit to him. Their first son, Alexander Raban Waugh (Alec) was born five years later and their second, Arthur Evelyn St John (Evelyn), five and a half years after that. I do not
know why these events were so spread out. Sexual, medical, or psychological inconveniences doubtless played their part. Evelyn complained to his friends at university that he was an unwanted child, which might have been true, though I cannot imagine how he would have known it.

  In any case, by the time of his mother's death in 1908, Arthur was forty-two, his eldest son was ten and Evelyn was five years old. As he stood beside his mother's open grave in the cemetery at Midsomer Norton dewy-eyed, reflecting on the past and wondering how to keep himself young at heart, Alec, sitting on his own at a harsh boarding school a hundred miles away, took out a pen to write him a letter:

  Dear Father,

  I was very sorry to hear Gaggie was dead. We shall never forget her, not if we live to be a hundred. The Headmaster told me after lunch, he was very, very nice about it. I am not with the others but in the big classroom. Only this morning I was looking forward to the summer when I should see her dear old face again, but now I shall never see it. Mother told me in her letter that you had gone down to Midsomer Norton, but I did not think for an instant she would die. How sad for Mother, you and the Aunties. She was the most loving and kind mother you could wish for. How long will you stay at Norton? How could we have thought that we would be parted from her forever and so soon? Now as I think of her, always kind, always gentle and loving, it makes me cry to think that I shall never see her again.

  Love from your loving son, Alec

  Arthur and K's first child was born in July 1898. They christened him Alexander, not in homage to the boorish flagellant of Midsomer Norton but to honour the Brute's grandfather, Dr Alexander Waugh DD, known to all his descendants as ‘Alexander, The Great and Good’. This venerable Scottish minister was, in the early nineteenth century, one of the founders of Mill Hill Grammar School and the London Missionary Society. Although he talked with an impenetrable Lauderdale accent, he is revered by his descendants for one deed above all others – for anglicising the family. It was he who put an end to our scooping porridge with our fingers, to our strapping sporrans to pantless kilts, to blowing bagpipes, tossing cabers, kentingJaithers and all those abominable habits that are still considered so quaint north of our border. These reckless ceremonies had bonded Waughs to their chill and puritanical obscurity for long enough. Now it was time for something better. In 1782 the Great and Good packed his bags and moved south with his large and growing brood. London was a revelation to the Waughs. For the first time they could experience for themselves the polished manners, the blithe humour, the dignity and the affluence of southern England from which none of us has ever looked back.

  As a preacher, Alexander Waugh was widely admired; as a father of ten children and grandfather of sixty, he was unsparingly adored. In every surviving account, he is portrayed as amiable, modest, fair-minded, humorous and a good violinist to boot. When he died in 1827, in his seventy-second year, his coffin, horse-drawn from Trafalgar Square to the City of London, was trailed by a stream of mourners that stretched for over half a mile. His remains lie to this day with those of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake in the Bunhill Fields cemetery – but I digress … In any case, by September 1900, Arthur's little boy's name had been pruned from Alexander to Alec, in honour of his recently deceased uncle, the malarial mariner, and from 1909 onwards Arthur had a special name for Alec, which was ‘Billy’.

  From the outset Arthur had assumed that the only two passions he had successfully shared with the Brute – cricket and amateur theatricals – should form the basis of his relationship with his own son. By the time Alec was six Arthur had already taken him to see most of the famous Shakespeare plays. He had acted Julius Caesar in the nursery at Underhill and taken the title role in a production of Hamlet at his grandfather's house in Midsomer Norton. Every summer Arthur and Alec went to cricket matches at Lord's, at the Kennington Oval or on the Hampstead cricket ground. During the day, they played a single-stump version of the game in Underhill's garden. When it was too cold for that, Arthur regaled his little boy with tales of cricketing deeds or the scores of foreign test matches, gleaned from the pages of Wisden. At other times they walked together across Hampstead Heath holding animated discussions about literature and ‘ideas’. Every night Arthur sat on Alec's bed, drawing pictures in his sketch book, usually of men being killed. Before meals he would read poetry aloud – so much and so often that by the time Alec was nine he was intimately acquainted with all the major works of Shakespeare, Kipling, Tennyson, Browning, Shelley and Swinburne. As the years passed, Arthur's absorption in everything that Alec did and said came to occupy most of his waking thought, and the boy was swept along in the tide of his father's affection. ‘My father was a wonderful companion,’ Alec wrote, many years later. ‘When I look back on my first years I find that every memory I have is connected with him. My nurses are shadowy figures, my mother did not become distinct until a much later day. I remember my father reading to me, my father taking me for walks, my father playing cricket with me…’

  Alec was small – diminutive beside his classmates – and he never grew above five foot five. At school he excelled in games and at English literature. His brightness could be credited to his father's assiduous grooming, and to the force of his own enthusiasm – not, perhaps, to the hereditary efficacy of his brain. He had perfect manners. I remember him when he was an old man, visiting my father at Combe Florey. Did he make strange clicking noises in his mouth? Did he look a bit like a monkey? These are my memories. Papa was very fond of him.

  If the clicking mouth and simian posture were features also of Alec's youth, they probably passed unnoticed by his father, who was pressed to observe a single fault in his elder son. To Arthur, everything that Alec did or said was a glory and a holy miracle, and he was hurt when others thought differently. Alec's headmaster believed that he was a spoiled brat and told Arthur so; another school-master, S. P. B. Mais (later a well-known novelist) accused the boy of ‘putting on side of a peculiarly unpleasant sort… unbearably rude and unbearably miserable, drifting he knows not whither. Probably he will end up by getting expelled.’

  In defence against these accusations Arthur advanced the theory that Alec had two ‘soul-sides’ to his nature and that the side which he adored was rarely, if ever, visible to anyone but himself. ‘There is no doubt that I get the best of it,’ wrote Arthur. ‘I wish the rest of the world got some more, however.’ To an old friend who had recently come to stay at Underhill and had clearly missed the point of the golden youth, Arthur wrote: ‘How I wish you could have stayed longer. You and Alec could have explored the world together in his mother's absence, and I know you would learn to like each other. For Alec improves immeasurably on acquaintance. His pearls are hidden in a rough casket: but he shows them shyly to those he loves.’ The same point was frequently put to Alec with regular pleas from his father to ‘open up your heart a little’: ‘You are much too ready to conceal your feelings; when you do show them, as you do to me, you are the nicest boy in all the world. But many people won't believe me when I say so because you hide your real self under a rough and rowdy exterior.’

  Within a few years of the Brute's death Arthur's paternal devotions had inflated into something of an obsession. By 1911, when Alec was boarding at Sherborne, Arthur was writing to him every day and awaiting his responses in the palpitating manner of a teenage paramour. News of Alec's marks in class or his achievements on the games field was read with more urgency than news of the impending war: team scores and class marks were copied and telegraphed to Arthur's friends and relations up and down the country. In his pocket, wherever he went, Arthur carried about with him his treasured copy of the Sherborne school roll in which he kept a detailed record of all Alec's scores and marks, underlined the names of pupils and masters that Alec liked and carefully noted his weekly position in class. Every Friday after work Arthur left his office in Covent Garden with a small suitcase of clothes, took the train from London 150 miles to Sherborne and set up court at the Digby Hotel, where he in
vited Alec and his muckers for every meal, befriended their teachers, watched games on Saturday and attended services in the school chapel on Sunday morning.

  I think that Arthur may have suffered from the same syndrome that is claimed of the pop star Michael Jackson. Those who are brutalised by their fathers often find themselves unable to grow up: they are consumed with a need to relive their childhood over and over again to get it right. This is what I have heard. Arthur's craven desire to relive his childhood found expression not just in his love for Sherborne and Alec but in a redrawn fantasy-idyll of childhood and home at Midsomer Norton. In 1914 he wrote an article entitled ‘Lights of Home’ for the now defunct Fortnightly Review:

  The old homeward way always finds every one of us a child again. What is it but this longing to revive the heart of childhood that leads our feet so often to the old, familiar hills?… It was here that we were young; here that we first hoped; here that we first loved. And when youth and hope and love are all at an end, it is here that we would choose to rest, returning, like a hunted stag, to the spot where we were roused, in the land which memory has always kept unspoiled and unspotted from the world.

  By 1912 the relationship between Arthur and Alec had become so intense that it was not long before those who cared for Arthur began to worry for his sanity. Others were less kind: as he walked into his office at Chapman and Hall his staff would call to him sarcastically, ‘And how is Master Alec this morning, sir?’ Arthur did not seem to mind for he could barely bring himself to think or talk of anything else. In December 1913 he wrote about it to an Anglican priest who specialised in the confessions of fallen women: