I'm not THIS bad
From Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition
by George McCartney:
In his memoir, Will This Do?, Auberon Waugh reports a telling incident from his father's dining table. During the rationing mania following World War II, some British bureaucrats took notice of a recent shipment of bananas, a fruit that had been long absent from [the] English diet at the time. Since the amount was limited, equitable distribution posed a difficulty. They decided the moral solution would be to provide every child in the realm with one banana. This meant three for the Waughs. "The great day arrived," Auberon recalls,
by George McCartney:In his memoir, Will This Do?, Auberon Waugh reports a telling incident from his father's dining table. During the rationing mania following World War II, some British bureaucrats took notice of a recent shipment of bananas, a fruit that had been long absent from [the] English diet at the time. Since the amount was limited, equitable distribution posed a difficulty. They decided the moral solution would be to provide every child in the realm with one banana. This meant three for the Waughs. "The great day arrived," Auberon recalls,
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.Auberon...declares he never again "treated anything [his father] had to say on faith or morals very seriously."
I'll say what I said when my book club read Brideshead Revisited:
ReplyDelete"WHAT a DICK."
you got it,jen. this is exactly why the british emplire declined.
ReplyDeleteOh, God. I had parents like his...
ReplyDelete