Son of the Fascist

"After all, you don’t dress all in black, skulk in the shadows ..., weigh eight stone and hide in your college room doing equations, then get into heroin and do it until you die at the age of 39, alone in your west London flat, to be found the next day by the cleaner, because you feel loved and nurtured by a family of whom you are intensely proud, do you?" - Giles Coren, "This is one Mosley whose name should live on", The Times
 
on reading that Oxford University is planning to end the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, due to the namesake's father's and grandparents' ties to Fascism
 
How many fathers have buried their sons
because they were too stupid to die before them,
as is the hoped-for way of death, and generations?
 
Who'd be cursed with a gran like Diana Mitford,
who may have been handsome, clever, and rich,
but all in all, was ugly and common as hate,
Botticelli's Venus stuffed with slick, writhing maggots.
 
(Sometimes you wouldn't blame a kid
for knocking granny on the head
and rifling through her purse.
Chucking out, perhaps, her diamond swastika.)
 
And who'd have not been tempted to the smack
on seeing dad's gross escapades with jackbooted
strippers, Blackshirted prostitutes,
and orgies of worse morals than Caligula's?
 
Let history look back and laugh with cruel,
derisive, sheer contempt at Oswald, Max,
Mitford, the elder Mosleys better dead.
But children aren't always parents.
 
A little shame for what your parents thought
is natural, but when your dad was dense as dung,
his dad's guest of honour at his wedding was Hitler;
when one of your great aunts was rumoured to have borne
the bastard's bastard babe...
the shame could be overwhelming.
 
Di and Os and Max died old and well cared for.
Alexander wasn't yet forty,
and was found the next day, by his cleaner.