My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles by Alec Waugh

Author:Alec Waugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1967-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Part Two

13

Arthur Waugh’s Last Years

When I was young, we were taught history in terms of battles and betrayals; of treaties and capitulations, of crowns and dynasties. Henry V was addressed as ‘England’ and Louis XIV as ‘France’. It was assumed that a country prospered or declined as its monarch’s stock rose and fell. No one wondered how the people fared under these capricious changes. Spain was England’s enemy through the second half of the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth century. We were taught to assess the power of Spain by the defeat of the Armada. We were never taught that for a century and a half the stupendous wealth of the New World was poured into the coffers of Seville, while the people of Spain starved.

It is fashionable today to regard the 1930s as a period of ignominy for England and the start of the next decade as Britain’s Finest Hour. Yet actually for many Britons the world continued to be navigated on an even keel. My father who was born in August 1866 died in June 1943 and I suspect that the last ten years of his life were the happiest.

My father has been described at length in my brother’s autobiography A Little Learning and in my Early Years. Both pictures are drawn with love, devotion and in admiration. They are supplementary to each other. I was closer, far closer to him than my brother was. I was in far greater sympathy with him. Evelyn and he were constantly in conflict. They were irritated by each other. In my mother’s opinion they were too like each other. For that very reason, my brother understood him better. A Little Learning gave me a fresh insight into a number of facets of my father of which I was aware only subconsciously. In a novel there is nothing more difficult to depict than the ‘good character’, the ‘good influence’, the man or woman of integrity. There are not enough contrasting shades. For that reason the reader will get a more vivid picture of my father from A Little Learning than from my Early Years. And it is a very sympathetic picture. Any father would be proud to have had such a tribute paid to him.

A Little Learning stops in the year 1925. My Early Years stops in 1930. Nineteen-thirty was, as I have said, a watershed for me. So was it for my father. At the end of 1929 he resigned his managing directorship of Chapman & Hall, retaining his chairmanship of the board, and acting as reader and adviser, working at his home in Hampstead. His salary was less, but it was adequate now that he had only himself and my mother to support.

It was a great relief for him. The years between 1925 and 1930 had been hard. He was over sixty and he was tiring. His chest was troubling him. In camp as a volunteer when a quite young man he had, through sleeping on a wet pillow, set up trouble in his left ear and he was very deaf.

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