AICE LIT MIDTERM: AHOD Characters

Tony Last

Main character. Tony Last is a member of the landed gentry in 1930s England. A little over 30 years old, Tony lives at Hetton, the ancestral country estate where he grew up, with his wife, Brenda Last, and their young son, John Andrew. He becomes increasingly disillusioned with his life and marriage, ultimately seeking escape from his mundane existence.

Brenda Last

Brenda Last is Tony Last’s wife. Around 5 years younger than Tony, the attractive Brenda is still in her mid-20s and has grown bored with her isolated domestic existence at Hetton, yearning for the glamorous London social life she once enjoyed.

John Beaver

John Beaver is a 25-year-old unemployed Oxford graduate who lives at home with his mother, Mrs. Beaver. Widely disliked in the London socialite scene that he tries so doggedly to penetrate, Beaver is correctly judged a charmless social climber and freeloader with little personal value to offer.

Jock Grant-Menzies

Jock Grant-Menzies is a London socialite and member of Parliament. Jock is level-headed, good company, and universally well-liked. Once thought of as a potential match for Brenda Last before she ended up with Tony Last, he in fact does marry her in the novel’s epilogue after Tony’s disappearance and John Beaver’s departure.He serves as a contrast to the more disillusioned characters, representing stability and charm in their lives.

Mrs. Beaver

John Beaver’s mother Mrs. Beaver is a widowed interior decorator and ruthless social operator. She keenly exploits every social opening to generate more business for herself, and she heavily assists her parasitic son’s freeloading and social climbing maneuvers. She rents the flat to Brenda Last that Brenda uses for her trysts with John Beaver.

John Andrew

John Andrew is the young son of Tony Last and Brenda Last. A passionate and curious child with an innocent lack of any filter on what he’ll say, he adores horse jumping, which he practices with Ben Hacket.

Mrs. Rattery

Mrs. Rattery is Jock Grant-Menzies’s girlfriend, whom he invites to join him at Hetton for the fox hunt. Before meeting her, Tony Last has already dubbed her the “shameless blonde,” in apparent reference to some prior act. Contrary to his expectation of a gregarious airhead, however, Rattery is highly laconic and austere. She arrives at Hetton behind the wheel of a propeller plane, establishing the pattern of bold, masculine behavior that characterizes her.

Dr. Messinger

Dr. Messinger is an eccentric explorer searching for a lost city in the Amazon, whose mission Tony Last joins on a whim. As Tony knows nothing about travel and survival, he entrusts himself to the apparently experienced Messinger, but as their Amazon journey progresses, Messinger’s competence comes into question. His unwavering but misplaced confidence in his own understanding of the Amazonian natives causes them all to abandon him and Tony, essentially dooming their mission.

Mr. Todd

Mr. Todd, the English-speaking son of a missionary and an Amazonian native, runs the remote jungle ranch onto which Tony Last stumbles in his fevered delirium. Mr. Todd nurses the near-death Tony back to health, but his care takes on an increasingly sinister character as it becomes clear that he will not allow Tony to leave.

Rosa

Rosa is a Macushi woman who speaks English and acts as the interpreter between her people and Tony Last and Dr. Messinger. She attributes her English knowledge to having “live[d] bottom-side two years with Mr. Forbes,” an unexplained reference. She consistently demands cigarettes from Dr. Messinger, and she frustrates him and Tony by insisting that her people will not accompany them to the Pie-Wie territory and must turn back.

Polly Cockpurse

Polly Cockpurse is a ringleader among London gossips and socialites. She was ruthlessly successful as a social climber, ascending from obscurity into the center of the scene, marrying an earl along the way. Her party provides the occasion for Brenda Last and John Beaver’s first romantic rendezvous. Polly is the first to hear of and spread the word of Brenda’s affair with Beaver, and she aids Brenda in her effort to set up Jenny Abdul Akbar with Tony Last. Brenda is at Polly’s house having her fortune told when she hears the news of John Andrew’s death.

Jenny Abdul Akbar

Jenny Abdul Akbar is the American widow of a Moroccan prince, who lives in the flat next to Brenda Last’s. Brenda tries to use Jenny to bait Tony Last into an affair—thereby taking the pressure off her own affair with John Beaver. Jenny is a vulgar and ridiculous character, constantly making histrionic references to her own suffering and cursed fate. Her attempted seduction of Tony fails spectacularly, although she does awaken erotic feelings in John Andrew, who becomes infatuated with her.

Mrs. Northcote

Mrs. Northcote is the fraudulent fortune teller at Polly Cockpurse’s gathering, which Jock Grant-Menzies interrupts to inform Brenda of John Andrew’s death. The ladies are each enraptured by Mrs. Northcote’s mysterious and exciting fortune readings, but the reader soon finds out that she gives the same generic prediction to everyone. Waugh intended her character to exemplify the false prophets and idols to which people flock in the absence of religion.

Dan

Dan is another guest at the Brighton resort where Tony Last takes Milly for a weekend of staged adultery. A previous client of Milly’s, he recognizes her and invites her and Tony to a raucous party, which they attend.

Marjorie

Marjorie is Brenda Last’s younger sister. Though lovely as well, she is “more solid than Brenda.” She and her husband Allan are popular but not rich, and they live in a small house in London. Brenda normally stays with them when she comes to town, until she gets her own flat. Marjorie consistently disapproves of Brenda’s affair with the odious John Beaver, though she is almost alone among London socialites in doing so.

Allan

Allan is Marjorie’s husband and a prospective local political candidate in South London. He feigns ignorance of Brenda Last’s affair when she mentions it to him. After Brenda leaves Tony Last, Allan exercises his diplomatic instincts and tries to act as peacemaker by going to each of them separately, lying to Tony that Brenda wants to reconcile, and likewise lying to Brenda that Tony will grant a divorce to avoid scandal.

Reggie

Reggie St. Cloud is Brenda Last’s oldest brother and an eccentric amateur archaeologist, a pursuit that has yielded various antiques but little financial reward. Oafish, “unnaturally stout,” and unaware of his own clumsiness, he is nevertheless called in to mediate between Brenda and Tony Last and deliver Brenda’s extortionate alimony demands. Predictably bungling the interaction, Reggie instead agitates Tony into refusing alimony altogether, leaving Brenda out to dry.

Ben Hacket

Ben Hacket oversees the horses on Hetton’s grounds. A gruff and foul-mouthed member of the lower class, he earns the young John Andrew’s adoration for teaching him how to jump horses and entertaining him with vulgar stories. His genuineness and simple, traditionally masculine virtues provoke John Andrew’s admiration in a way that the boy’s parents do not. After Richard Last and his family take over Hetton, Ben remains employed on the grounds and helps Teddy with fox-farming.

Nanny

John Andrew’s nanny is a stern old killjoy who consistently decries John Andrew’s innocently crass behavior and foul language, which she attributes to the influence of Ben Hacket. Nevertheless, her distaste for the grand Hetton foxhunt and wish to prevent John Andrew from participating prove prescient, given the disaster that occurs. Her concern for John Andrew is genuine, if unappreciated.

Mr. Tendril

Mr. Tendril is the local priest at the Hetton church, which Tony Last tries to attend every Sunday. Tendril was stationed in British colonial India many decades ago, and he still repeats the same sermons he wrote for that setting verbatim, to ridiculous effect. However, neither Tony nor the village parishioners mind the bizarre and incongruous sermons, to which they are long accustomed. Tendril’s character highlights the church’s failure to adapt to and address the pressing concerns of modern existence, preferring to live blithely in the past as its rites transform into a meaningless social ritual.

Miss Ripon

Miss Ripon is a villager near Hetton, whose unruly horse kicks and kills John Andrew on the day of the fox hunt. Miss Ripon had no business riding the difficult horse, which had thrown and injured her earlier that day, but her father had been cynically trying to sell the horse for an unreasonable price and wanted to have it shown off.

Milly

Milly is one of the two prostitutes, along with Babs, that Tony Last and Jock Grant-Menzies meet at the Old Hundredth club on the night of their drunken spree. She and Babs fail to secure Tony and Jock’s business on that night, but she later agrees to go with Tony to Brighton, helping him frame himself as an adulterer to secure his and Brenda’s divorce (due to the divorce laws of the time). She insists on bringing along her insufferable eight-year-old daughter Winnie, to Tony’s dismay. Her and Tony’s strained interactions throughout the weekend reveal Tony’s discomfort in dealing with people of a lower class, inadvertently insulting Milly.

Winnie

Winnie is Milly’s eight-year-old daughter. Brought along against Tony Last’s will on his and Milly’s weekend in Brighton, she threatens to derail the whole staged premise of an adulterous tryst. A relentless brat, her very vocal whining throughout the weekend makes Tony miserable at the time, but the unwanted attention it draws turns out to save him from Brenda’s extortion attempt by rendering the evidence of his “adultery” useless.

Thérèse de Vitré

Thérèse de Vitré is an 18-year-old Trinidadian girl aboard Tony’s transatlantic crossing. Her family, presumably aristocrats in France, came to Trinidad during the French Revolution and became part of the island’s small aristocratic elite, from among whom Thérèse, bound by custom, will eventually choose a husband. Thérèse and Tony Last strike up a brief romance during the voyage. She speaks the cold and formal English of a well-educated foreigner, and her personality is correspondingly opaque—ironically, since de Vitré is French for “made of glass.” Tony’s offhand mention of the fact that he’s still technically married sours their relationship, and Thérèse loses all interest in him, disembarking in Trinidad with hardly a goodbye.

Richard Last

Richard Last is Tony Last’s cousin, whose line of the family had been disinherited from Hetton by rite of primogeniture. Nevertheless, he and his rambunctious family still think of Hetton as their own when they come to visit Tony and Brenda at Christmas, making Brenda uncomfortable with their rustic, un-aristocratic ways. After Tony’s presumed death, Richard and his family are the closest living relatives and inherit the estate. He and his family happily move in, and he downsizes the staff and introduces fox farming on Hetton grounds to bring in extra cash.

Teddy

Teddy is Richard Last’s 22-year-old son. He lives with his family at Hetton once they move in. Teddy, with Ben Hacket’s help, eagerly takes to the fox-farming his family has introduced to Hetton grounds. The novel ends with Teddy proudly surveying the caged foxes, imagining that they will be the path towards “restor[ing] Hetton to the glory that it had enjoyed in the days of his cousin Tony.” While this may seem like a rather unrealistic scheme, Waugh foreshadows the notion that Teddy carries Tony’s legacy forward when Jenny Abdul Akbar repeatedly mistakes Tony’s name as Teddy.