Fathers and Sons Read online

  And choose your reading carefully. Swinburne, who was a victim of self-abuse (as I once told you), is not a very wholesome companion. Nothing inflames the mind like a lascivious picture or a suggestive line of poetry. Try to concentrate on the more manly poets and give as much of your mind as you like to games, out of school. That is the proud boast of the English system that its games banish morbidity. You won't get your firsts unless your body is in subjection. Train the body, by this perpetual effort of putting off temptation, to be the handmaid of the soul, and not its cruel mistress.

  I have told you all I know about the subject. A father can do no more. And what helped me to bear the bitterness of Stuart-Prince's letter was his assurance that you are trying, really trying hard, to live a clean and decent life. That in itself is the beginning of grace. What can we, any of us, do but try? And in all your efforts, your struggles, your failures, your beginnings again, in all that makes life one perpetual battlefield, you have at any rate one fellow soldier by your side; one who has fought all your battles before you and knows every inch of the way.

  Well I know thy trouble,

  O my servant true:

  Thou art very weary;

  I was weary too.8 But Billy darling, your father is by your side. Lift up your eyes unto the hills.9 Fight the good fight.10 Faint not nor fear.11 We have gone all the way together. We shall rest together in the glory that shall be revealed.12 Ever your devoted friend, your true and loving father.

  Alec had shown courage in revealing to his teacher that he was a masturbator, but what he did not admit, either to his father or to any of his masters at school, was that he had also fallen in love with a boy called Simonds. In the letter above, Arthur had intimated his relief that Alec's trouble did not involve younger boys – a far graver sin than masturbation – and it was not the first time that the subject had been broached between them. Eighteen months earlier he had written:

  As you know, my ambition for you is illimitable. There is nothing I could not hope to see you do. But I would rather that you were ploughed in every exam, and never even get your seconds or your house-cap, than that any boy should be able to say that he had injustice at the hands of Waugh, or any small boy that he regretted the day when Waugh had first spoken to him

  History does not record if Simonds regretted the day that Waugh first spoke to him, but the relationship did not in any event last ong. Soon Alec was in love with someone else, another ‘small boy’, this one called Davies Minor.13 Alec wrote to a schoolfriend: ‘I shall never get tired of kissing Davies mi, he is a darling. But he is leaving this term, O lacrymarum fons, it will be lonely without him.’ And as his affair with Davies was still raging on, Alec wrote again to the same friend:

  These loves are great passions while they last. They are mad and short and burn themselves with their own fire. I doubt that I shall ever feel again the same ecstasy that I knew three years ago when I discovered that I was in love with Simonds. You will probably smile at this but it is true… The love of boy for boy is in my mind one of the most beautiful things in life. The first time we love, we love a person, afterwards we only love love. The first is the greatest and whitest passion and it is usually one of boy for boy.

  It is not known to what extent Arthur was aware of these goings-on. Davies was invited to stay with the Waughs in Hampstead in 1915 after he had left the school, but in the event he did not come, ‘merely because his silly ass of a father thinks he might be hit by a Zeppelin’. Arthur opened his doors to a constant stream of Sherborne boys and masters during the school holidays, but neither Davies nor Simonds would have been invited, as friendships with younger boys were strictly forbidden. But Arthur wasn't blind. He suspected that secrets were being kept from him, and every Sunday in church prayed vigorously for the moral welfare of his elder son. ‘This morning Mother and I went to the 8 o'clock service at St Augustine's (where you were baptised) and by some strange fitness we had the hymn you used to be so fond of as a little fellow. And all the time my thoughts and prayers were of you, and you, and only YOU.’ On Alec's birthday, the following year, Arthur went to High Mass at Notre Dame cathedral, in Paris, ‘and before the altar of so many historic memories I prayed with all my heart that a good year might be opening before you’.

  No sooner had he sent Alec his strictures on self-abuse than Arthur was back with the old refrain. Billy must tell his father more:

  We have had some sorrows to share together this year: but the great thing is that we have shared them, and that you have dealt with me as a man. Last year there were some secrets in your life which you had not told me, and in a way I was happy in ignorance. But that is no real happiness. To know all is to forgive all. There may be secrets that you keep from me today: but I hope and believe that they are not many, nor serious. So long as you can confide in me, all must be well: for your very repugnance to have to tell me things will make you avoid doing them. And this has been a year I hope of real progress and advance in character for both of us. Because I learn all the time, side by side with you. I learn to understand and to discount. And you I trust learn to rely on my love, and (where experience is of any use) on my judgement. ‘The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another’:14 and may nothing ever disturb our sympathy, or ever cloud our mutual understanding!

  But Alec's letters home still did not tell Arthur all he needed to know: they were factual accounts of cricket or rugby matches, his advances from house captain to school prefect, his marks in class and small items of parochial gossip concerning teachers and pupils. At the beginning of 1915 Alec informed his father that he wished to leave school before his final year and to fight in France, like other boys, for his country. He was still too young to join the army without his father's permission, which, given the long lists of casualties published in every daily newspaper, was not unnaturally withheld; but Alec resented having to stay on at school and began to turn against the hallowed place. On one occasion his father was shocked to hear him describe Sherborne as ‘a hole’. Alec was moody and adamant: ‘It is a poor place bound down by fatuous pedagogues and their antiquated ideas. A rotten lot they are!’ Many of his friends had left and so had several of the best young teachers.

  By 1915 Sherborne was empty and forlorn and Alec wanted out. But Arthur needed him to stay on, not just to keep him out of the war for as long as possible but so that he, Arthur, might not lose those sensations of vicarious youth that had, over the last four years, made Sherborne so dear to him. Apart from anything else his ambitions for Alec's school career were not yet fulfilled. In February he wrote to him:

  The whole of my hearts ambition these last years has been centred in the hope of seeing you lead Sherborne to great things, your soul well knit and all your victories won. For that I have prayed and thought and wrought – trying to order my own life so that it should be a help to you in ordering yours. Your career has been a discipline to me. Without blasphemy I can truly say that I have nailed my own soul to your cross. I know your troubles, your difficulties, the intolerable loneliness that comes upon every man of spirit now and then. ‘Who knows them, if not I?’ But let us hold on to the last. We may yet see light before the summer, and you may yet go back in September to the golden year that I have dreamed of so often… May you leave Sherborne with a double-first and a history scholarship. Then there will be no more to ask, except and above all, that good name which I know you are really striving hard to leave behind you.

  It was not to be. On top of his fond embraces with Davies mi Alec had also started experimenting with another young boy called Mervyn Renton.15 What they did together, I am not sure. Alec admitted to ‘kissing’ and to whipping other boys’ bare bottoms with a wet towel. It might have been one of those simple pleasures or it may have been something more physically convoluted. Whatever they did, it was classed as ‘smut’ and they were caught at it, in flagrante delicto. The second master, George Morris, wrote to inform Arthur, who rushed immediately to Sherborne, sobbing with grief,
to plead with the headmaster, known as the Chief, not to expel his son. By the end of their long and emotional meeting Arthur had won a small concession. The Chief agreed that Alec could finish the term but would not be allowed back for his final year. Renton, as the younger of the two boys and, by definition, the ‘victim’, was allowed to stay on. Meanwhile instructions went out to the school that no boy was to be seen in the company of that ‘dirty little beast’ Alec Waugh.

  Arthur returned to London a broken reed. All of his dreams, his high ambitions, his soft romantic hopes, all brutally shattered. He also felt humiliated. For four years he had been boasting to his friends and relations about the glories of Sherborne and Alec's fine career there, telling them how much he was looking forward to Alec's final year, when, who knows?, he might be head of house, head of school, captain of cricket, captain of everything. Now he had to explain to them all why those carefully laid plans had suddenly changed – he would have to invent a lie. Arthur's letter to Alec of 5 June 1915 reveals the depth of his despair:

  My Own Dear Boy,

  The Chief has taken out of my hands all choice in the question which we have so often debated together. He has asked me to take you away at the end of this term; and that is an end of all the matter. But, when I tell you this, I beg you to keep it sacredly to yourself. It is the first time to my knowledge that such a thing has happened to a Waugh. I want no one to know of it, except the Chief, Mother, you and I. It is enough that we should have to bear it. So let us keep it to ourselves. It is enough.

  Although Morris has written me a most kind letter, I do not know – and I do not think I want to know – the

  exact particulars. But at any rate I know that this boy Renton is one whom you have never mentioned to me; and I can tell you, Alec, that I tremble for fear of what other name may come up next. There are two months left of term. I pray you as you honour the peace of your home that this is the last blow that Sherborne is able to deal. I know you will see to that. We have had enough.

  You will understand of course that I cannot put in any more appearances at Sherborne in the festal way; so I shall write to the Chaplain to tell him that I shall not be present at Commemoration. And as I know, knowing you better than all the Sherborne world, how sad you will be to have brought such sorrow to your home, I entreat you to do no wrong, nor think it, in the days that are left to you. The honour of the family depends upon your conduct.

  I wish you had written to me yourself. Morris wrote the kindest of letters but you had no need of any intermediary. I feel for you and sorrow for you, and love you through all your troubles. And so does Mother. And I told Chief that my confidence in you is such that none of these disappointments shakes my faith in the real Alec, the true Alec, the son of my soul, who has walked so many miles, his arm in mine, and poured out to me a heart that the rest of the world will never know, but which I treasure as a golden gift from God. No failure can disturb my faith in that. And the true test of life still lies ahead of us.

  ‘Faint not nor fear: his arms are near He changeth not, and thou art dear.’16

  That is as true of earthly fathers as of the one supreme Father to whose care I commend you in my prayers tonight.

  Ever in trust,

  Your devoted Daddy

  For the two remaining months of that term, Alec was shunned by all but a handful of his closest friends, while Arthur quivered in London, deep in a mire of his own despair: ‘I cannot now say what I think of Sherborne as a whole. My heart is really nearly broken with bitterness and disillusionment.’ But through the hazy sheen of his tears, through his hot suffering, Arthur sensed that the bond between himself and Alec had been intensified by the upheaval: ‘Dear Boy, I am sure there is some spiritual relation between you and me which transcends the merely material world.’ He now believed that he could reach out to his son by some form of mystic telepathy, that he could sense when Alec was in danger or in need of his love. On Sunday 20 June he went, as usual, to the service at St Augustine's Church in Kilburn where he knelt down and started to pray intensely for Alec. Then the choir struck up the very hymn – number 595 – that Arthur always used in his Alec prayers: ‘When in sorrow, when in loneliness, in thy love look down and pity their distress.’ The coincidence was too great, the sound too emotional for the father to bear. ‘And as the choir sang that, I felt in sudden certainty that you were in trouble, so keen that the tears welled out of my eyes, and the people next to me couldn't help seeing that I was crying.’

  Arthur was convinced that his relationship with Billy, the ‘son of his soul’, was a special gift from God. K found the idea incomprehensible, but Alec also believed that he and Arthur could communicate with each other by telepathy even when they were hundreds of miles apart. When the decree went out for Alec to be ignored by all the boys and masters of Sherborne, Arthur once again claimed to have sensed that Alec was in trouble before the news had reached him:

  On Monday, when I got your letter, I felt certain you were keeping something back. That is why I wrote and entreated you not to withhold your confidence in me. There must be something super-natural in such a tie: and bitter as the thought of this boycott of my Boy is to me, and mad as I feel with the Sherborne I used to love, I am thankful that you have told me all about it, and that I can share

  your grief and perhaps help you to bear it. The nails that pierce the hands of the Son are still driven through the hands of the Father also.

  The concept of the father and son bound together by the nails that pierce through them both was one that he had developed earlier. In a frenzy of saturated religious emotion Arthur now saw himself as God the Father and Alec as the Saviour Jesus Christ at the point of death, with both of them, nailed, suffering, bleeding and entwined on the cross at Golgotha:

  There is a rare sort of crucifix found in one or two Gothic cathedrals in France, in which behind the figure of the Son, as he hangs upon the cross, is vaguely to be discerned the figure of God the Father also. The nails that pierce the Sons hands pierce the Fathers also: the thorn-crowned head of the Dying Saviour is seen to be lying upon the Fathers bosom. And it is always so with you and me. Every wound that touches you pierces my own soul also: every thorn in your crown of life tears my tired head as well. Be sure of that, as you are also sure (for you must be that) that when your hour of redemption comes, the first to share it will be the father who has never doubted or given way. God bless you Billy. It is a bad time but I know you will bear it like a man…

  With deep love and unfaltering trust, still and always, your ever devoted and hopeful Daddy

  It was Arthur's belief that he and Billy had somehow merged into a single spiritual entity and, as such, he was willing to share in the punishment of his son's disgrace. ‘Though Sherborne has still the power to banish her defenders, the fault is ours first and foremost. And I take the blame with you, my son, and bow to the rod, and lift up my heart in the hope for better things to come.’

  And then, of course, the likelihood of war for Alec dawned. In Arthur's last letter to his son at Sherborne, he hardly mentioned the war but on the day he wrote it, he also composed a stirring poem in which the jubilant shouts of schoolboys on their last day are submerged by the din of the summoning guns of France. It was called ‘Last Day of Term’ and later, when Arthur discovered it crumpled in the pocket of an old suit, he sent it to the Spectator. Despite the defeat and despair evident in the last letter, Arthur tried his best to sound an optimistic note:

  I cannot resist a feeling almost of anguish, as Time drives in these last nails – the last half-holiday, the last Sunday, the last concert with its Valete of many memories.17 A few hours more and the Sherborne where my heart has journeyed almost every hour of the day these last four years will be fading into the past. But I have learned that even if there had been no war and no trouble the hour had struck to go. There are many leaves turned down in the record of the last four years to which my memory will recur often and often in the days to come – golden hours we have spe
nt together, some bright hopes realised and dreams fulfilled and many, very many evidences of your love and loyalty. Sherborne has done that much good for us. ‘For the days that have been, we bless thee, Mother of Men.’ And gratitude for what has been helps me to look forward with hope to what lies ahead. God bless you, son of my soul, and help us all along our way. And so goodnight to Sherborne and a welcome to the world beyond.

  Ever, as you know, Your devotedly loving Daddy

  9Although she was christened Catherine with a C, she was known throughout her childhood as Katie – K was extrapolated from this.

  10Please note this expression, ‘watertight compartments’. It will feature later on.

  11D. Stuart Prince, housemaster of School House, Sherborne, 1913–14; scholar of Corpus, Cambridge, he was deaf.

  12Horace, Odes II, ii. 13, ‘crescit indulgens sibi dirus hydrous: ‘His own indulgence makes the dreadful dropsy grow.’

  13Masturbation was not considered unhealthy until 1710 when John Martens, a quack doctor and pornographer, proclaimed it as such in a book called Onania. Martens's fortune derived from the medicine sold in conjunction with his book. The Church did not consider masturbation a sin, or indeed link it to Onan's behaviour in Genesis, until after the publication of Onania.

  14Field game played with bats and balls.

  15Hamlet says to his mother (Act 3, scene 4): ‘Go not to my uncle's bed… Refrain tonight, and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence.’

  16From the Lenten hymn ‘Christian, Dost Thou See Them?’ in which Jesus's words continue, ‘But that toil shall make thee someday all Mine own. And the end of sorrow shall be near My Throne.’ The same hymn contains the warning against snares set by the powers of darkness: ‘Christian, dost thou feel them,/How they work within,/Striving, tempting, luring,/Goading into sin.’