Will This Do?

Born into the vastness of Pixton Park in Somerset, Auberon Waugh was drawn early into class warfare; he pretended he had seen evacuees and children of servants eat rat poison so they would all have their stomach pumped. His father despised him. Bron responded in kind, finding his father hypocritical and pretentious. Some of Evelyn's friends, such as John Betjeman and Graham Greene were kind to Bron, but it is those who snubbed him such as Cyril Connolly, Maurice Bowra and Anthony Powell who loom larger. Embarrassing early sexual fondlings, an inglorious early exit from Oxford, a failure to get into M15 and an army accident which left him confined to a hospital bed and unable to escape from a friend of his mother's who insisted on reading him Lawrence Durrell and a humiliating time spent writing captions for Page 3 girls, reduced the now declasse Waugh to friendships with journalists on the fringes of respectability - Richard Ingrams, Paul Foot, Peter Cook and Nigel Lawson. Now in his 50th year he sums up a literary achievement, asking the august creator of this being, "Will This Do?".