Fathers and Sons Read online

  17Psalm 121.

  181 Timothy 6:12.

  19Deuteronomy 20:3.

  20Isaiah 40:5; Romans 8:18.

  21William Wookey Northam Davies, died in 1965. He is called Davies Minor, sometimes abbreviated to ‘mi’, because he had an older brother at the school, Henry Davies (born 1896), who became a solicitor in Wales.

  22Genesis 31:49.

  23‘Merv the Perv Rentboy’, as he was known, left Sherborne in 1918. He became a major in the Royal Artillery and died of wounds at Fort Caput in 1941.

  24Last verse of the hymn ‘Fight the Good Fight’.

  25The ‘Valete’, the Sherborne farewell ode, was traditionally sung by the whole school to those who were leaving at the end of the summer term: ‘We shall watch you here in our peaceful cloister/Faring onward, some to renown, to fortune;/Some to failure; none, if your hearts be loyal,/None to dishonour.’

  IV

  Lacking in Love

  The birth of Evelyn Waugh at ten thirty in the evening of 28 October 1903 was neither an emotional nor an obstetrical triumph, as far as Arthur and K were concerned. Both felt deflated at having had another boy. ‘I always longed for a daughter,’ Arthur wrote to Alec, thirty years later – it was another of his regular refrains. K consoled herself by giving the new baby an effeminate name, by fluffing up its hair and by dressing it, for longer than was usual even by the standards of those days, in the laces, bonnets, ribbons, smocks and frilly appurtenances of the dream-girl she had craved. Alec, at five and a quarter, tried to lighten the mood: ‘Good. Now at least we shall have a wicket keeper,’ he said, on hearing of his brother's birth.

  But Arthur and K were not for cheering. Quite apart from the baby's sex, its delivery had gone badly wrong. The precise details of Evelyn's birth have not survived but I happen to know that it was a gory affair entailing heavy loss of blood before the doctor's arrival and a great deal of surgical stitching after. K told this to one of her daughters-in-law, who told her son, who told me, so it must be true. I do not know if her father-in-law's Long Fine Dissecting Forceps played any role in the proceedings.

  Only one scribbled entry appears in K's diary between 28 October and 17 November that year. After that the entries were occasional and scratched in pencil, which implies that she was still laid up in bed – pots of ink were unwelcome in bedrooms; she did not resume in pen until 24 December. Her first attempt to venture downstairs was on 13 December, a month and a half after Evelyn's birth. Three days later a wheelchair was delivered to the house and on 18 December a fit maid pushed her up and down Hillfield Road for three-quarters of an hour in it. Although by late January 1904 Arthur described K to a friend as ‘picking up strength’ she was still too weak for social engagements and remained depressed. Postnatal traumas of one sort or another continued to dog her for the best part of that year.

  I do not say that Arthur took against Evelyn because of these things, only that it was an inauspicious start to their relationship. I am sure there were other factors. The day after Evelyn was born K received a strange letter from her Tasmanian sister-in-law. It was found, many years later, tucked into her diary at the day of Evelyn's birth and reads: ‘What a pig Edmund Gosse must be to tell such lies about you. People like that are a constant annoyance and irritation to one and are much better out of your lives and I know if I were in your place I would have no more to do with him. There are plenty of good people in the world without seeking out the unpleasant.’ This is mystifying. What could these lies have been that Gosse was spreading about K during her pregnancy? In my fantasies Great-granny was having affairs with lots of men, Evelyn was a bastard, Arthur was not his father – I am not I, thou art not he or she: they are not they, such things as dreams are made on…

  In the early days of Evelyn's youth he was a warm, bright, sweet-natured and affectionate child who worshipped his mother. For many years he did not notice K's minor limitations. Adored by all who met her, she was a stoic, the humble backbone of Underhill; aloof, quiet and undemonstrative, she acted as a sponge to Arthur's loquacious theatricality. She was shrewd and prudent, but not particularly bright. She read books uncritically, hated writing letters and was perplexed by poetry. Thrifty and furtive with money, she saved her small allowance over forty years into a substantial hoard at the post office, but told nobody about it. Her savings book was discovered under her bed only after her death. She was born to the Raban family, who may have been anciently Jewish but for five generations at least, were of sturdy Christian colonial stock. K was a teetotaller, who lived for her family, her country and for the Empire. Her brother Bassett, killed in the trenches of the Great War, was ADC to George V at the Delhi Durbar. Her father, grandfather and great-grandfather – judges, soldiers and colonial whatnots – all died in India.

  Evelyn knew that Alec was his father's favourite son but, as a small boy, tended to regard this state of affairs as perfectly normal. As an adult he dismissed the problem with the traditional British stiff-upper lip, describing his childhood as ‘blissfully happy’. ‘I was not rejected or misprized,’ he told a friend, ‘but Alec was their firstling and their darling lamb.’

  Evelyn's biographers have all asserted that, while Arthur preferred Alec of his sons, K's favourite was Evelyn. This was the version put about by Alec, who was made to believe it by Arthur – perhaps to assuage his guilt at the exclusivity of their own relationship. In later life Alec did much to rewrite the history of Evelyn's relationship with his parents, but there can be little doubt that Evelyn believed both of his parents – not just his father – loved Alec best: he was ‘their firstling and their darling lamb’. The evidence of surviving letters supports this, suggesting that Arthur and K were united in their unbounded fascination for Alec. It was a folie à deux. Although K was officially allotted Evelyn to entertain while Arthur and Alec went out for long walks on the Heath, to cricket matches or to the cinema, her heart was also with Alec and his amazing school career. In this she shared in all of Arthur's enthusiasms, breaking down in tears of emotion when Alec won prizes, gained his school colours or scored well in a cricket match. ‘A thousand congratulations! It is almost too good to be true,’ she wrote to him. ‘How we have longed to see you wearing that blue and gold ribbon and now at last you will do so.’ In the morning she would rush to Covent Garden if there had been a late-arriving letter from Alec, so that Arthur could read it in his office. ‘You are always with us in spirit,’ she told Alec, ‘our lives and interests all centre in you.’ Her demonstrative reaction to Alec's being on the winning side in a house match has also survived:

  My dearest Alec,

  Happy, HAPPY, HAPPY! Hurrah! HURRAH! HURRAH! I am so awfully pleased at your winning that cup. It has been my one wish all these days and now that it has been fulfilled it is almost too good to grasp. I nearly went mad with joy – and your 77! Some score that! It was a real fine performance. I am so happy, my joy is unspeakable. Thank you ever so much, Ally boy, for the pride and pleasure you have given me. May you always play the game wherever you are and come out strong in an emergency…

  In her letters to her elder son K frequently complained about Evelyn: ‘He was particularly patronising and bumptious these holidays’; ‘Evelyn went about in a depressed manner with contemptuous looks.’ Remarks like these are interspersed with extravagant praise for Alec, for his ‘nobleness of character’, for his ‘championship of the oppressed and the misunderstood’. She calls him ‘my precious Baba boy’, ‘my pretty fluffy one’, ‘my little Duckling’. There were no such epithets for Evelyn. K, unlike Arthur, never admitted to her favouritism. When Evelyn once asked her, ‘Daddy loves Alec more than me. So do you love me more than Alec?’ she replied artfully, ‘No, I love you both the same.’ ‘In which case,’ Evelyn retorted, ‘I am lacking in love.’

  If it were not true that K quietly preferred Alec of her sons, Evelyn nevertheless had cause to assume that she was not ultimately a player in his team. Her first allegiance was to Arthur. When he arrived home after a
day's slog at Chapman and Hall, he would shout from the hall, ‘K! K! Where's my wife?’ and Evelyn would be deserted for enthusiastic, grown-up conversations about Alec. As Evelyn recalled in 1962 of his father: ‘My earliest memories of him are of an interloper whose visits confined me to the nursery and deprived me of my mother's company. The latch-key which admitted him imprisoned me. He always made a visit to the nursery and always sought to be amusing there, but I would sooner have done without him.’

  When Alec read this passage in a newspaper he wrote to its author from Singapore: ‘How different our lives were! Your day ended at the very point when mine began – with the click of our father's latchkey in the door.’

  In the summer of 1912, when Evelyn was eight, he developed acute appendicitis. The doctor decreed he must have an operation. For a week before Evelyn was confined to bed where he composed a little rhyme:

  I hate so much to stay in bed,

  They seem to think I am almost dead,

  I want to sing, and dance and leap And not to have to go to sleep

  O glory to the time when I

  May leap and shout mine own war cry.

  The operation was conducted with chloroform on the kitchen table at Underhill. Evelyn committed a picture of this traumatic event to his diary. It shows a jubilant doctor waving scissors and a knife in the air as Evelyn is held down by his mother. Another figure (probably Arthur) bangs a chisel into his son's penis. For six days after the operation Evelyn was too ill to write and remained strapped to his bed for a week in order that he would not rip his stitches. When at last he was released his legs were too weak to stand. Arthur sent him to a vacated girls’ school to recuperate where they forced him to undergo electric-shock and cold-water treatments. Of course Evelyn was miserable: ‘For the first time in my life I felt abandoned.’ Arthur sent him a typed letter describing K's supreme courage, her suffering and her anxiety at the time of the operation. Because Evelyn had not written home, he was scolded by Arthur for his ingratitude in an elaborate letter invoking the precedent of Jesus and the ungrateful lepers. At no point did Arthur seem concerned or interested in his younger son's suffering. In A Little Learning Evelyn wrote, ‘I was moved not to penitence, but intense resentment by this missive.’

  At home Arthur did little to disguise his preference for Alec. When Evelyn asked for a bicycle in April 1914 – a contraption for which, as we shall discover, Arthur indulged a peculiar fetishism – he went off and bought a bigger and better one for Alec, and gave Evelyn a small box of theatrical facepaint instead. As future ‘head of the family’, Alec was always served first at table. He always got the best presents. Everything Evelyn was given came to him ‘shop-soiled and second-hand’, and he knew it. When Alec asked for a billiard table it was put into Evelyn's nursery where it blocked the room and was bitterly resented. On his return from Sherborne at the beginning of the school holidays he was greeted by a festoon banner draped across the grandfather clock in the hall which proclaimed, ‘WELCOME HOMETHE HEIRTO UNDERHILL’. This happened several times until Evelyn finally shamed his father by asking: ‘And when Alec has the house and all that's in it what will be left for me?’

  Alec and Arthur were a two-man gang from which Evelyn was excluded. No wonder he supposed that they were conspiring against him. From the age of eight Alec was given limited powers to discipline his younger brother and, for a while, contemptuously referred to him as ‘It’. Evelyn told friends outside the home that he hated Alec, and believed that his father and brother hated him, too. In 1914, when Evelyn was eleven, Arthur wrote to Alec at Sherborne:

  Mrs Fleming cordially told me that I had never been a good father to Evelyn, who was afraid of me, and at his worst in my presence! Cheery news!! But she told one good story of his sharp tongue. He went round the other evening in a bowler hat. They exclaimed – ‘Eve, fancy you in a bowler.’ And he replied, ‘Yes, it belonged to father first: then it descended to Alec: now to me. In fact it has come down to me from generation to generation of them that hate me.’ So she added – ‘You see, he is always at his best with me. Quite different from what he is with you.’

  Evelyn was not sent to boarding school until he was fourteen because Arthur had decided that, with the imminent prospect of war, he was unlikely to be rich enough to put both of his boys through a good boarding school education so Evelyn was instead sent to a cheaper day school, near Underhill, called Heath Mount. Much of Evelyn's youth was spent at home with his mother and father while Alec was away at school, and conversation was all of Alec. It was ‘Alec this and Alec that’, ‘Sherborne this and Sherborne that’. Arthur's obsessive interest in his alma mater did not recede even after Alec had left the place. The ‘goodnight to Sherborne and welcome to the world beyond’ that he had predicted in his last letter to Alec at school never materialised. Even when Alec had joined the army a year later, his father wrote to him of Sherborne: ‘I dreamed of Sherborne all last night – it was amazingly vivid – every stone of the place stood out – but I cannot remember now any incidents of the dream – only the glowing picture of the abbey and the chapel in the morning sun.’ And when Alec wrote to Arthur to inform him that he, too, had had an interesting dream about Sherborne, Arthur was so overcome with emotion that he was ‘reduced to tears at the breakfast table. I found it quite difficult to pull myself together and get off to the office.’ As Evelyn revealed in his autobiography: ‘Every night of his life, my father told me, he dreamed of being a new boy at Sherborne.’

  Evelyn naturally longed to follow in his brother's footsteps and to experience at first hand all the excitements of that hallowed place that had so occupied his father's dreams and waking thoughts, but Arthur, as I say, was afraid that he would not be able to afford to send him there. His income had remained the same for several years and war offered no hope of improvement. ‘Look here,’ said Evelyn to his father, in October 1916, ‘Hooper is going to Sherborne in the summer term. Can't you buck up and do some articles for the Fortnightly so as to be able to afford to send me also?’ Arthur was injured and wrote immediately to Alec to complain: ‘Seeing that I had had an assessment that morning for £14-2 income tax to be paid in January and had worked just on eight hours at my desk and was dead tired, I felt this insult was about the last straw!’1

  In the end Evelyn was sent not to Sherborne but to Lancing College, a Woodard Foundation school on the Sussex Downs near the sea. He had been put down for Sherborne and taken by his father to see it, but in the year that he was due to go there The Loom of Youth, Alec's hastily written, autobiographical novel about his schooldays at Sherborne, was to be published. Arthur arranged a lunch with the headmaster, explaining to him that Alec's book might shortly be in print and that it might be seen, in places, to take a highly critical view of the old school. ‘Suppose it is published,’ he asked the Chief, ‘can I possibly send Evelyn to Sherborne?’ In his autobiography Arthur says: ‘We agreed that I could not.’

  Evelyn was unforgiving that his father had been party to such an ‘agreement’. In his eyes Lancing, about which he had heard nothing, was vastly inferior to Sherborne, about which he had heard so much. The decision to send him there was, as always with Arthur, made on the spur of the moment. Evelyn was admitted, before Arthur had even inspected the place, on the basis of a few photographs the headmaster had sent in the post. The reason for Arthur's choice was that Lancing's high Anglicanism might suit Evelyn's religiosity. But Evelyn's religious phase had come and gone three years earlier when he was eleven. Then he had shocked his father by announcing that he wanted to be a priest, but all that now remained of this old enthusiasm was a lingering fascination for Gothic architecture and illuminated manuscripts. He wondered if Arthur's decision to send him to Lancing was some kind of punishment – but for what?

  Arthur and Evelyn saw Lancing College together for the first time when they travelled down from London on a cold damp morning in May 1917. They were both struck by the magnificence and vastness of the college chapel. Arthur, according
to K's diary, was ‘well satisfied with the place’, though Evelyn remembered him comparing it unfavourably with Sherborne. They had tea with the headmaster, then Arthur took a taxi back to the station leaving his younger son to his fate. As Evelyn later recalled, ‘I parted from him without a pang.’

  Arthur was never cruel to Evelyn in the way that the sadistic Brute had been cruel to him, and Evelyn was never afraid of his father. Taken as a four-year-old to Hampstead fair, Evelyn enjoyed himself so much that when Arthur told him it was time to go home for lunch he lay on the ground beating his fists on the grass, yelling at the top of his voice, ‘You brute, you beast, you hideous ass.’ Arthur was amused. He only beat Evelyn twice and on each occasion it was for defacing Underhill – once for cutting the corners off a mantelpiece with a new knife and once for smashing a hole through the back of a downstairs cupboard in order to crawl into the foundations to play. Arthur needed always to be liked, and he liked to be praised: to this end he was lavish in his compliments to others. Evelyn, on the other hand, had an advanced talent for seeing through people and was blunt in his criticism. In an article for the Sunday Telegraph he later admitted, ‘My father, though irritable, was constantly kind. I took this for granted in childhood with many other benefits which I have since learned are not universal. Taking good things for granted is the essence of a happy childhood and my nursery days were spent in unclouded joy and love; love of my mother and nanny; not, at that age, of my father.’

  His criticisms of Arthur were that he was old, boring and slightly preposterous. Arthur was thirty-seven years old at Evelyn's birth and was grey-haired by the time that his son was old enough to form memorable opinions of him. He was also fat-bottomed, he wheezed due to his asthma and surrounded himself in ostentatious clouds of pipe smoke. His face was red and he talked too much. At school Evelyn boasted to his friends that his father was an officer in the Royal Navy, but the truth was written in his first diary, during September 1911, when he was only seven: ‘Daddy is a Publisher he goes to Chapman and Hall office it looks a offely dull plase.’ In his autobiography fifty years later, Evelyn elaborated: