Read Did You Really Shoot the Television? Online
Authors: Max Hastings
Did You Really Shoot the Television?
A Family Fable
Max Hastings
For Charlotte, Harry and Calypso: the next generation
I am the least significant character in the story which follows. But it was an enquiry about the fate of the TV set in the London family flat of my childhood which prompted me to embark upon it. Throughout the long life of my mother, the journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James, I wrote little about our tumultuous family experiences. In 1986, featured as the castaway on the BBC’s
Desert Island Discs
, I dodged tricky questions about parental relations. I incline to my mother’s view, that ‘All families are dysfunctional.’ However, when she enjoyed the same experience on
DID
in 2003 – and of course, most of us find it pleasing to talk about ourselves in such a context – at the age of ninety, she was much less inhibited. To the audience’s delight and my toe-curling embarrassment, she regaled Sue Lawley with tales of our old squabbles, and of my admittedly pretty frightful childhood behaviour. For weeks afterwards, people came up to me in filling stations and other unlikely places, demanding: ‘’Ere – did you really shoot the television?’ We shall address that question in due course, but I want to make plain immediately that it was not a big set.
The latter part of the book evokes personal memories of my parents and childhood, partial and fragmentary as all such yarns are. Until we reach the 1950s, however, I have sought to sketch some of the doings of the Hastingses and Scott-Jameses who came before me. Their experiences, journalistic and adventurous, fed my own aspirations. The tale is not founded upon delusions that our family has been important. The bylines of Macdonald Hastings and Anne
Scott-James, which were modestly celebrated in the mid-twentieth-century media, are quite unknown to a younger generation, as is the way of the world. Most of us have been ‘nearly’ people. Some of the clan, indeed, barely kept their heads above water. We have spasmodically proved capable of making a little money, but never of hanging on to it. Though our collective experiences all over the world in the past century of war and peace have been varied and picaresque, other English middle-class families can boast similar excitements. What is unusual, I think, is that our lot wrote it down. Even the least materially successful were highly literate. They committed to paper what happened to them at school and at home, in fashion studios and newspaper offices, on battlefields, in the African bush, and even on a desert island.
The story is based upon published and unpublished autobiographical material assembled by its principal characters. Beyond the miscellany of family papers which I possess back to the 1850s, my grandfather Basil wrote a book entitled
Memoirs of a Child
; his brother, great-uncle Lewis, published an anecdotal autobiography,
Dragons are Extra
; Lewis’s son, cousin Stephen, likewise wrote
The Drums of Memory
. My father, Macdonald Hastings, published
Jesuit Child
and
Gamebook
, together with accounts of his most memorable journalistic exploits –
The Search for the Little Yellow Men
and
After You, Robinson Crusoe
. My mother wrote
Sketches from a Life
and
In the Mink
, which professed to be a novel, but was an almost undisguised memoir of her time in the fashion business. Her father, Rolfe Scott-James, published mostly literary criticism, but left a manuscript account of his relationships with some literary idols of his day. My stepfather, Osbert Lancaster, wrote a memoir of his childhood,
All Done from Memory
.
In addition, they produced millions of words of journalism, more than a few about themselves. Wherever possible here, I have allowed them to tell the tale in their own words. Such an approach is not a formula for objectivity. Leslie Stephen, creator of the
Dictionary of National Biography
, observed that ‘No good story is ever quite true.’ But this is a book designed to divert and entertain, rather than to enrich the annals of the times.
A very ordinary family’s doings attain interest when its domestic details are preserved from a century ago. There are lots of gaps – things which I have been unable to discover. For knowledge of feuds and scandals, for instance, I am dependent upon anecdotage rather than documentary evidence. Tolstoy famously observed that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That line prompts me to recall a sally of my mother’s, one day as we were lunching together, when she was a mere adolescent of eighty. ‘You still haven’t forgiven me for your childhood, have you?’ she said, with her customary abruptness. I replied that she was quite wrong about that. One should judge things by how they turn out. Most of my life has been uncommonly fulfilled. I probably inherited from her whatever talents I possess. I added, however: ‘If you try a different question – did I enjoy my childhood? – the answer is “no”. When I was three or four, I doubt that you and I would have recognised each other in an identity parade.’ Mumsy paused for a moment, brooding. Then she said: ‘Whoever did you hear of who did anything with their lives who had’ – the next bit in tones of withering scorn – ‘
a happy childhood?
’ She claimed that Frank Muir, her fellow panellist on the 1960s and ’seventies BBC radio quiz game
My Word
, was the only clever man she ever met whose domestic life appeared satisfactory from the cradle to the grave.
There may be something in what she said, though I doubt that its moral would deserve a place in a manual on child-rearing. On my side, there seems merit in writing a book like this at sixty-three, rather than at thirty-three or forty-three. Whatever follies Mummy and Daddy committed, I have had time to learn, as we all do, that the only privilege of children is to make different mistakes from those of our forebears. I have so often failed as parent, husband and everything else that I now understand, as few of us do before middle age, how hard it is to get things right.
Some details: in the text below, I refer to each family member by name rather than relationship. Thus, my parents are ‘Mac’ and ‘Anne’, rather than ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’, except when I write explicitly about our dealings with each other. I have mentioned money
a good deal, because when I read books about other people’s lives I like to be told how they did, or did not, make ends meet. Trollope shocked his contemporaries by itemising in print the earnings from each of his novels, but posterity is grateful. I have said less about my sister Clare than her part in the family experience deserves, because it would be wrong to associate her with my perspective and judgements. Six years younger than me, a big gap in childhood, she saw things in her own way, invariably more temperate and less jaundiced than my own. Mac, Anne and I alike owed her more apologies than ever got expressed, for many and various injustices which we inflicted upon her. Likewise my half-sister Harriet Hastings, born in 1964, near the conclusion of the story told in these pages, has plenty to forgive us all for. I am happy here to make my own act of contrition to both siblings.
I have not written much about my own schooldays, which were disagreeable in the usual banal way. This is the story of a family, not about the miseries of English boarding education for boys who are no good at games. I have described in earlier memoirs –
Going to the Wars
and
Editor –
my experiences first as a foreign correspondent, later running the
Daily Telegraph
for a decade.
Did You Really Shoot the Television?
is a prequel. I have written it in fits and starts, and held back from publication until my mother, last of her generation of Hastingses and Scott-Jameses, was dead. My admiration for her will become plain, but she never appreciated my jokes.
I grew up with an exaggerated pride in my family’s journalistic and literary heritage. I only realised in adulthood how modest this is by the standards of serious writers. At the outset, I was obsessed with sustaining it. At seventeen, I had read almost all the forty-odd books which the previous two generations of Hastingses and Scott-Jameses had then published. Like most children, I passed through a phase of awe towards my parents, into one of scepticism which persisted for several decades. Today, I can enjoy the memory of my own mistakes alongside theirs, and draw pleasure from the fact we alike experienced adventure, editorship and authorship. A condescending critic might say that we scrambled on the lower
slopes of literary endeavour. I prefer to think of us all as reporters, sharing many of the same thrills and spills – three generations in turn discovering that you are as good as your last story, until finally, as Tourneur observes, ‘That which would seem treason in our lives is laughter when we are dead.’
Max Hastings
Hungerford, Berkshire
The Tribe
Lots of families possess delusions of grandeur about their ancestry, and ours is no exception. Tess Durbeyfield’s feckless peasant father liked to indulge a fantasy about his descent from the grand Dorset family of d’Urberville. Some modern Hastingses of our branch of the name cherished a notion that they should be earls. Both my father and his cousin Stephen were at pains to assure me that if there was any justice in the world, the Huntingdon peerage would rest in our hands, rather than in those of the upstart Hastingses who possess it. They wasted several hundred pounds, significant money fifty years ago, on a joint attempt to prove as much, with the aid of professional genealogists. Steve, a veteran Tory MP and Master of Foxhounds, married
en secondes noces
into the grand Fitzwilliam family. In old age, he became rather cross when I suggested that in truth – and as the evidence shows – our paternal ancestors were a pretty humble lot. Though some important people in British history have been called Hastings, it is impossible to trace connections between them and us. Walter Pater, asked if he was related to the French painter of the same surname, answered: ‘I hope so; I believe so; I always say so.’ This is charming, but silly.
I have no idea what our family did with itself before the nineteenth century, when we emerged as small-town Northern Irish Catholics, in an era from which few records of such people survive. Since Hastings is not an Irish name, I would surmise that some ancestor crossed from England in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, perhaps as a soldier. The first of my forebears of whom I
know anything is James, who lived at Brooke-borough, Co. Fermanagh, in the early 1800s. The most notable characteristic of the Brookeborough Hastingses was that they were not merely Papists, in that fiercely Protestant society, but devout ones. God played a dominant part in their lives throughout the ensuing century. In the bitter years before Catholic Emancipation, when the 1798 uprising was a recent memory, several of them emigrated to the United States, where two became Jesuits.
My own great-great grandfather, Hugh, born in 1810, briefly attended Queen’s University in Belfast, moved to England in 1827, married a Wiltshire girl named Ann Sweatman, and taught mathematics and classics at various schools. He worked for a time in the 1850s as a jobbing writer at Knight’s Agency in Fleet Street, producing essays and articles on any subject required, including the geography of Fermanagh and the topography of London. This was the family’s first association with the Grub Street world which would loom large in our lives in the following century. In 1857 Hugh emigrated to America, where he taught at a school in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He was living there with his five children, among them my great-grandfather Edward, born in 1850, when John Brown staged his famous raid, which helped to precipitate the US Civil War. I still possess my great-great aunt’s narrative of the drama.
Conflict brought only grief to the Hastingses. Hugh was too old to fight, even had he wished to. His enthusiasm for the Southern cause prompted him to invest his tiny savings in Confederate bonds, an early instance of the family’s hereditary improvidence. When he decided to return to England, he was obliged to borrow the passage money from a friend. Late in 1862, broke and disappointed, Hugh Hastings reached London once more with his family. He spent the last years of his life teaching at University College School.
Somehow, despite their modest income, there was just enough cash to send Edward to Stonyhurst, the grim Jesuit public school in Lancashire ‘for the education of English Catholic gentlemen’s sons’. In 1867, the boy had just completed five Spartan years when his father suffered a stroke and died. Family hopes that Edward might study
science at London University were dashed. He had to make a living. He was articled to a solicitor at a salary of thirteen guineas a quarter, and remained a solicitor’s clerk, albeit later a valued and well-paid one, for the rest of his life. Fortunately, a family friend provided him with an allowance of £75 a year to supplement his earnings.
In 1877, Edward married Elizabeth Macdonald, a Scottish teacher working in Carlisle – heaven knows where they met. The couple produced eleven children. The family’s income never much exceeded £400, yet on this they managed to occupy a relatively large and comfortable London house south of the river – 29 Trinity Square, Borough – and to send all the boys to Stonyhurst. Edward and his family inhabited the genteel lower-middle-class world familiar to us through
The Diary of a Nobody
. His writings and experiences echo those of Mr Pooter. Yet the family correspondence also reveals Edward, like his father, as a literate and devout Pooter, fluent in Latin and Greek. His religion was the core of his life.
Basil Macdonald Hastings, Edward’s second son and my grandfather, was to become the first of the family who made a living from the pen. His boyhood in that big Victorian family – ‘the Tribe’, as they called themselves – is minutely recorded, because many years later he published a charming account of it,
Memoirs of a Child
. He said nothing of his father’s spiritual torments and worldly disappointments. Basil merely rejoiced in an early life full of incident, in which a modest income somehow sufficed to provide fun as well as education. I first read his narrative when I was twelve, and it inspired me with a sense of heredity which is usually the privilege of grander dynasties.
Probably because Edward’s financial circumstances made close budgeting essential, as well as because he possessed a meticulous temperament, he commissioned custom-printed account books. In these, he recorded every detail of expenditure on behalf of each member of the ever-expanding Tribe. Ethel, his first child, arrived in 1879; Lewis, the eldest son – named for Leyson Lewis, the family benefactor who provided Edward with his vital allowance – in the following year; my grandfather Basil in 1881. Thereafter babies, all born at home, followed in a profusion that must have gladdened the heart of the family priest. Like Dickens’s much-put-upon clerk, ‘the Cherub’ Reginald Wilfer of
Our Mutual Friend
, Edward had a ‘limited income and an unlimited family’. The account books eventually contained separate pages for:
Hastings Mrs E
Hastings Ethelreda Agatha Gordon
Hastings Lewis Macdonald
Hastings Basil Macdonald
Hastings Gladys Mary Fraser
Hastings Beryl
Angela Macdonald
Hastings Claude Hugh
Hastings Aubrey Joseph
Hastings Everard Ignatius
Hastings Eulalia Emily Macdonald
Hastings Muriel Magdalen
Hastings Rene Francis
In 1890 the family’s annual income was £416, of which household costs consumed £200, rent a further £70, an annual holiday £17.11
s
.3
d
. Edward recorded expenditure upon himself of £6.2
s
.0
d
on clothes; 2
s
on hair cutting; £11.0
s
.6
d
on lunches; £3.12
s
.0
d
on
travel. In 1901, the last year for which the account books survive, his salary was just £312.10
s
.6
d
, the family’s expenditure £319.17
s
.5
d
. This included seventeen tons of coal at £22.10
s
.6
d
; lunches at £6.2
s
.6
d
; £10 on a holiday; £6.2
s
.0
d
for clothing; one penny for a diary; half a crown for postage; £20 for Elizabeth; £3 or £4 apiece on the children, including 3
s
.5
d
for dress-lining for Beryl, and 2
s
.4
d
for Claude’s sand shoes. There were also assorted halfpennies for orphanages and the destitute; a few pennies apiece to the church choir, school treats and various Catholic charities. Edward bought one suit a year, collarless to save on the expense of ties. He paid £10 in income tax.
He was obsessed with keeping records, a habit honed by thirty years in a solicitors’ office, and he made his children follow suit. From their earliest years, transgressions were minuted. They were required to make formal confessions or promises of future good behaviour, like this one signed by Lewis:
I Lewis Macdonald Hastings do hereby pledge myself to my father as under
1. not to buy on credit
2. not to apply again to my father for a loan
3. to repay present loan of £2.5.0 by weekly instalments of 5/
4. I represent to my father that I want the present loan to repay R. Gray for a liability they have incurred on my behalf for a suit of clothes
5. to buy myself a nightshirt.
Basil suffered similar embarrassments, which he was also obliged to confess. Edward debated his own dilemmas in writing, as in this memorandum to himself, dated 2 May 1901: ‘Question: whether having power either to send Claude and Aubrey to Stony-hurst or to Wimbledon we ought to exercise that power in favour of Stonyhurst when the consequences will be that Muriel cannot be sent to school till she is 16.’ Stonyhurst’s fees were £14.18
s
.5
d
a year, plus £2.8
s
.6
d
clothing allowance. Edward considered, and rejected, a
notion that if he borrowed money, Muriel might be sent away to school at fifteen. Instead, he made minute calculations about the cost of journeys to Lancashire. He concluded that a few pence could be saved by ensuring that the boys always took the college trap from the nearby station at Whalley. It was decided that Claude and Aubrey should indeed be sent to Stonyhurst, ‘using portmanteaux bought for Basil and Lewis’.
Edward’s children lived in awe of their father, perceiving his profound commitment to conducting life as religion taught. Basil wrote later of his father’s ‘nobility’, his behaviour as ‘an example of light and guidance’. Edward kept a secret journal in Greek characters, in which he described strivings with his own conscience which became more pronounced and indeed tortured as he grew older. He scarcely ever lost his temper. Once, after displaying anger to their maid, in the midst of the following Sunday lunch he summoned the girl and apologised in front of his children. Basil described him: ‘Silent, always apart, he passed through the world shunning company, afraid that he might become too attached to temporal things.’
A priest who was a family friend described him as ‘the ideal Catholic layman’. Basil said: ‘You cannot write down how people are good. You just know it and cannot get away from it. I don’t think any of us remember his ever doing anything or buying anything for himself. He just worked and worked and prayed and prayed. Sometimes, the mater would buy him a packet of cigarettes and he would smoke one each evening. I think he was a little ashamed of that luxury.’ Each night, Edward blessed each of his children before they went to bed. In May there was always an altar to Our Lady on the staircase, before which the family gathered for prayers. Even by the standards of the Victorian era, the severity of the regime which Edward imposed upon himself seems flagellatory.
Yet nobody could exercise effective control over eleven children once their father disappeared to his office. Basil wrote: ‘Our garden was enormous, actually hedges and a mulberry tree. The hedges were absolutely right for ambuscades and sitting behind to eat all your sweets if you didn’t want to give any away. Once the garden was all
dug up into trenches in the most perfect manner (in connection with the drains) and the kids played at the Boer War, which was on at the time…They must have done it pretty well because we had a genuine Spion Kop where all the garden refuse had been piled up.’
When it rained, the back garden became swamped. Two French boys named Louis and Albert were then summoned from next door to re-enact the battle of Trafalgar. Lewis played Nelson, of course, though Basil as Hardy refused to kiss him. The Tribe were bemused by Louis and Albert’s ready acquiescence in defeat, but in those days the French seemed resigned from birth to English superiority. On other days the children enacted the battle of Lake Regillus, or put planks across the garden inundation and played Horatius holding the bridge across the Tiber. The Pater made them learn reams of Macaulay by heart, and they put the knowledge to good use. Lewis acted Horatius. Small members of the Tribe served as Tarquins, who fell in the swamp after being stabbed, ‘so that we were usually dragged in to tea and dripping instead of butter’.
Their father, ever the legal pedant, conducted ‘trials’ to mete out justice for his children’s outrages against each other, at which evidence was solemnly taken, witnesses cross-examined. Edward then pronounced a verdict, typically: ‘No jury could convict on such conflicting evidence. Case dismissed. Parties to kiss each other.’ Basil wrote: ‘That was the sort of trick the pater usually played on us. When we were all dead tired he’d stop the case and make us kiss when we’d much rather have been thrashed. It’s bad enough to have to kiss your sister, or any girl, but a brother – pah!’
The girls and boys fought each other relentlessly. Whenever it was the Mater’s day to go to the Stores, and Edward was safely absent at his office, there was a war. This might be started by Lewis snatching a book from Ethel, or Ethel making a sneering reference to the colour of Basil’s hair. Once hostilities had been joined, the girls flew to entrench themselves in their room, usually accompanied by a hostage, perhaps baby Everard.
In the ensuing siege, pepper might be squeezed through the keyhole, smelly chemicals pushed under the sill, the lock smashed
with a hammer and pincers. When the door was breached, the girls flew for protection to the servants – even in that modest household, there were three. Gladys might then avenge the girls by sneaking into the boys’ room and tearing a page out of a favourite book Basil had been given for Christmas. Basil wrote: ‘The funny thing about all of us was that none were particular chums. We all liked each other and fought each other constantly. No one was particularly popular and no one was unpopular.’ He speculated that one reason for this was that they were rigorously segregated from other local children, who were deemed socially unacceptable: ‘This probably had the effect of making us think that we belonged to quite a superior order of beings.’ Little Eulalia, once rebuked for speaking to strange children, replied serenely: ‘God made them,’ then, as an afterthought, ‘and made them like hens.’