Evelyn Waugh Hogs Bananas

Evelyn Waugh poses with his wife and assorted “defective adults.”

Waugh’s son Auberon on his father’s greed:

On one occasion, just after the war, the first consignment of bananas reached Britain. Neither I, my sister Teresa nor my sister Margaret had ever eaten a banana throughout the war, when they were unprocurable, but we had heard all about them as the most delicious taste in the world. When this first consignment arrived, the socialist government decided that every child in the country should be allowed one banana. An army of civil servants issued a library of special banana coupons, and the great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All three were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three. A child’s sense of justice may be defective in many respects, and egocentric at the best of times, but it is no less intense for either. By any standards, he had done wrong. It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him, but he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment….

Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (1991)

Waugh describes his children:

I have my two oldest children with me. I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults, hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous …”—Letter to Lady Diana Cooper