Did You Really Shoot the Television? (7 page)

In Rhodesia he kept a cheetah about the house: ‘Zunzu was often a bit of a trial to human visitors. To have a great animal suddenly leap in through the bathroom window was a test of character.’ One overnight guest objected strongly to discovering on awakening what he described as ‘a tiger sitting in my suitcase’. Lewis read a great deal, especially poetry. But he believed that excessive attention to intellectual pursuits dulled the physical senses, which grew more intense if denied books and newspapers. ‘You hear more – you see more things, you see more of them and you see further. That heightened sensibility to external impressions which shepherds have, and gamekeepers and gardeners and hunters – that’s one of the chief rewards. Awareness of movement and growth and seasonable signs, of footprints in the dust, of wind and the stars – these are the things that are blunted by books.’

Although nominally farming in Rhodesia, Lewis contrived to spend many weeks hunting in Mozambique and the Okavango Delta in Bechuanaland, as well as shooting lion and leopard closer to home. For years he was accompanied by his camp boss, Mafuta, a wartime veteran of the King’s African Rifles, ‘who could throw as pretty a salute as any Grenadier. If I hadn’t gone out with my gun-bearer at first light, Mafuta would materialise somehow out of the bush, stand rigidly at attention and deliver himself in his official voice somewhat as follows: “Good morning,
n’kosi
. Klass has cleaned the shotgun and gone out to get some guinea fowl. The elephants went over the river into the reed-bed last night. The
n’tombi
has come from the village with some eggs. A hyena has come in the night and taken a buffalo hide. The sugar is finished.” So there you were – all the real news in headlines. But Mafuta always put the good news first and the bad last, which is a much better idea than the one current in Fleet Street.’

One day when Lewis was out on a long trek, at evening he went out alone with a shotgun, in search of an antelope for the pot. After walking for some time, there was a sudden eruption in the bush in front of him. A bushbuck sprang out, he took a long-range snap
shot, and was delighted to see the beast drop, apparently stone dead. Leaning his gun against a tree, Lewis walked forward to collect the carcass.

The moment I bent down to handle him, he came to life. I threw myself down, and grabbed him by the throat. The next second his razor-sharp hooves cut clean through my belt, just missing the skin. Many and many a time I had handled calves for branding, but this thing was like a bundle of steel springs. I twisted my legs round him and bore down as hard as I could. My weight at that time was 190 pounds, the bushbuck’s no more than ninety, but it took everything I had to hang on and prevent his hooves ripping me in pieces. At last I managed to shift my grip from the throat to his horns, and with that additional leverage I wriggled him round underneath me until I could reach my knife, and open it with my teeth. All this time the buck was blowing foam in my face, his tongue was lolling out of the corner of his mouth, and he was making the fiercest kind of ram noises. But I got him where I wanted him in the end, drove the knife in and cut his windpipe. For quite some little time I sat down after this struggle covered with blood, mostly the buck’s. Then I tore my tattered shirt into strips, and fastened the antelope’s legs together. I draped the heavy body over my shoulders and started back for the camp. The buck seemed a great deal more than ninety pounds by the time I got there.

At their best, Lewis’s descriptions of his life in the bush achieved a lyricism not unworthy of being compared with those of Karen Blixen or Robert Ruark: ‘The dawn breaks on the wide plain of tawny grass and the scattered clumps of tall ivory palm. It is the air and light and visible world of the First Day, virginal and unblemished…Far ahead of you there are some glittering motes of light that suddenly resolve themselves into a group of impala, most beautiful of all antelope. At long range they dance like snowflakes and are almost as effervescent.’ Mac was intensely impressionable, and Lewis conveyed to his nephew a sense of the romance of Africa which never faded.
Less usefully, he also imbued him with some of his own contempt for the practical issues of life, solvency among them. Lewis’s values were those of Buchan and Sapper, which were starting to seem dated even in the 1930s. He never made the most of his considerable talents, because chronic restlessness caused him to go walkabout before finishing anything he started.

The most notable influence on Mac’s life, in the last phase before war came, was a woman. He struck up a friendship with a successful gentleman dentist named Bertie Pallant, who continued to practise despite having a country estate and considerable fortune. Bertie eventually squandered his money in a series of increasingly fanciful investments, but in those days plenty of cash remained. His rural acres lay in Sussex, south of Haslemere, and he was a keen shooter and fisher. Mac yearned to adopt these pursuits, but lacked experience, opportunities and cash. Now he began to edge into the rural world, and to explore a path to its pleasures. In 1938, for £50 he rented a cottage and rough shooting rights in Vernley Wood, a few miles from the Pallants’ place, and acquired an uncontrollable black spaniel which he christened Ruins, because the puppy was born in the old castle at Cowdray. A keeper looked after the dog while Mac was off earning a living.

Bertie Pallant had a smart, stunningly beautiful wife named Ruth, possessed of infinite Irish charm and considerable Irish recklessness. She and Mac embarked upon an affair which persisted for some years. Bertie was apparently acquiescent, for the three often went shooting and fishing together. Ruth sized up Mac, and decided that his years working at Lyons had given him some sorely mistaken ideas about what constituted the high life. She set about purging his vulgarities, and transforming him into a gentleman. With the aid of Savile Row and Ruth’s generosity, his wardrobe dramatically improved. He acquired his first made-to-measure shotgun, along with an impressive array of sporting impedimenta. He discovered that the Trocadero did not, as he had supposed, represent the summit of sophistication. Years later Ruth, who became my godmother, told me without embarrassment that she regarded herself as the architect of the new-model
Macdonald Hastings. The phrase ‘make-over’ had not then been invented, but that is what she imposed upon Mac. It had only one unfortunate consequence. Forever afterwards, he sustained a style of living without much attempt to reconcile this with his income. Ruth turned Mac into a dashing country-gentleman-about-town, lacking acres and cash to support his enthusiasms. This would lead to many tears before bedtime, mostly shed by Mac’s wives.

Yet his career was taking off. In December 1938, a few months before the outbreak of war, he achieved the highest ambition of many of his generation of journalists: at the age of twenty-nine, he was given a job on the new weekly magazine sensation,
Picture Post
. Created and edited by the Hungarian Jewish refugee Stefan Lorant, it burst upon Britain with a force only matched, a decade later, by the coming of television. Indeed, with its bold use of live-action photographs, its elevation of the 35mm Leica camera to an instrument of magic arts, it represented the last old-media print revolution before moving images seized the ascendant.
Picture Post
became the most thrilling workplace in British journalism, and Father one of its stars.

Mac had a fine visual sense, as well as natural skill as a wordsmith. Far from being uncomfortable about working in close partnership with a photographer, he adapted readily to the discipline. At the outset, he specialised in country topics. Then as now, journalists were an overwhelmingly urban breed, knowing little about rural life. This offered notable opportunities to a writer stricken with a romantic enthusiasm for the English countryside, such as Mac. There were more people who wanted to read about rural life than there were journalists capable of satisfying the demand. Political correctness being unheard of, Mac contributed big pieces to early issues of
Picture Post
on pheasant-shooting, badger-digging and otterhunting, as well as British farming, the life of a tramp, the work of vets. When King George VI paid a state visit to Canada, Mac was given a wonderfully glamorous transatlantic assignment. With a photographer he travelled to New York on the
Queen Mary
, recording the passage, then wrote two features on the city before travelling
north into Canada. The King and Queen had just crossed the continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mac was sent to trace the same journey, and describe what the King saw.

Afterwards, he travelled to the far north to write about life in the Yukon, visited a logging camp in British Columbia and the wheat prairies of Alberta, before catching the boat back to England. Back home, he persuaded the magazine to let him do a feature about buying a pair of handmade shotguns from Robert Churchill – though I doubt whether the £240 which he paid for them was chargeable to expenses. By the autumn of 1939, still just short of thirty, he had established himself as one of the young stars of
Picture Post
. The fears and sorrows of his teens were behind him. Journalism is more generous than any other career to successful young practitioners, offering not only a living, but almost unlimited opportunities for fun and adventure. Avidly, Mac set about exploring them.

My mother disliked her own family considerably. No photographs of them were visible in any house in which we later lived. She spoke dismissively of their professional doings, and recalled with distaste the oppressive atmosphere in their home. Born in 1913, she was ‘frightened of my parents, and grew up too soon for Dr Spock. I caught the tail-end of the Victorian philosophy that parents were perfect, and children always in the wrong, a righteous target for round-the-clock criticism. This made me very shy in company.’ Her paternal grandfather was a Congregationalist minister, a heavy, bearded Victorian, named Rev. John Scott-James, who presided over a church in Stratford-on-Avon and somehow contrived to educate eight children with the aid of scholarships. One such enabled my own grandfather, Rolfe, born in 1880, to attend Mill Hill school and then read classics at Brasenose, Oxford. Most of his sisters spent their later lives as spinster teachers in far-flung corners of the world. One, like her Hastings contemporary, became a nun.

On leaving Oxford, Rolfe spent some time living and working in the London East End missions at Canning Town and Toynbee Hall – he remained committed to liberal social causes all his life. He then embarked on a career devoted to literary journalism. After joining the staff of the
Daily News
in 1902, he was its literary editor between 1906 and 1912, when he became editor of the
New Weekly
. As a member of a prominent literary club of the day, the Square, he forged acquaintance, which in several cases ripened into friendship, with Galsworthy, Yeats, Walter de la Mare, Ford Madox Ford
and suchlike literary giants of the day, who seem to have thought well of him.

Ford whimsically addressed him as ‘James’ when feeling formal, and ‘Scottie’ at moments of affection. Rolfe noted Ford as appearing to have pink eyes – in truth they were light blue – sandy hair, ‘and looking rather like a guinea-pig’. One evening as they emerged from a dinner and walked together along Gerrard Street, Ford murmured wryly: ‘Oh, who would go into dark Soho/to chatter with dank-haired critics?’ He then turned laughing to his companion and said that he forgave him for being himself one of that breed, for Rolfe was always so kind to his books. For a time the young man was a lodger in Ford’s rooms in Holland Park, where he listened for hours to the novelist extolling the virtues of his literary heroes, Flaubert and Henry James – ‘the great panjandrum’, as he called him. Rolfe was unconvinced when Ford asserted that he had taught Joseph Conrad how to write. But his relationship with the novelist became one of the most important in his life.

Rolfe was a regular attender at Edward Garnett’s Wednesday-evening soirées. He dined with Galsworthy in Addison Road, to discuss how best to further the novelist’s enthusiasm for a National Theatre, and later stayed with him at his house in Devon. Hardy, whom Rolfe encountered several times, once took him for a walk around Dorchester, pointing out to the enthralled young man places which had inspired passages in the Wessex novels. He showed him the house in which he had imagined Henchard, the Mayor of Caster-bridge, to live; the grey Palladian mansion which he appointed to Lucetta Templeman; the church and other landmarks woven into his fiction. As they passed one cottage, Hardy said that it held deeply sinister associations in his mind: ‘When I was a boy, the hangman lived there. When very young I would hurry past it in fear. But later I watched it, still a little frightened, but fascinated. When the hangman himself put his head out of the upper window, I have never forgotten the dreadful impression which it made on me. I gazed at it for a moment with fear and wonder, then scampered off.’ At a later meeting, when Rolfe sought to quiz Hardy about his novels,
he was dismissive: ‘If I am to be remembered at all,’ he said, ‘I should like it to be for my poetry.’

Rolfe wrote an account of dinner with Algernon Charles Swinburne at his home, The Pines on Putney Hill, richly adorned with paintings by Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in 1908, the year before the poet’s death. When the young man arrived with a friend, Swinburne’s longstanding companion Theodore Watts-Dunton announced that they would sit down without their frail host.

When soup was over, he made a sign to us. We waited, listening, expectant. Then a slow tap-tap on the stairs in the hall. Swinburne was coming down, one step at a time – a solemn, prolonged tap…tap…tap…as one foot followed the other. He opened the door himself: small, slight – he seemed to be all head and eyes, wisps of hair on his face and scarcely any on his scalp. But although his voice was a little shrill, it was vigorous; he greeted us heartily, ate heartily, and talked robustly. His deafness made it necessary to repeat every sentence. When Swinburne got the point a glint of understanding lit up his eyes, and he began at length to answer and expound the point. Asked about a rival poet, William Watson, who like himself was an unsuccessful contender for the Poet Laureateship, Swinburne said contemptuously: ‘He made an assault on a Princess’s horse in order to qualify for the laureateship.’

He spoke of Meredith, saying: ‘I cannot read Meredith. I can’t stand the
literary flowers
which disfigure his style on every page. How affected he is, and what a snob. There is too much gentility in Meredith for a novelist or for any man.’ He asserted that he himself was a Jacobite: ‘All my ancestors were Jacobites. I pride myself that they were in all the rebellions. I have carried on the torch, yes, and I have made converts.’

Rolfe was a highly disciplined and prolific journalist who imposed strict regulation on his three children – Marie was seven years older than Anne, John two years younger. He was a self-consciously intellectual
figure, which helps to explain his weighty, indeed often leaden, prose style. Yet his work won contemporary respect. His first book,
Modernism and Romance
, was published in 1908, when he was twenty-eight, and was widely and generously reviewed. Two years later, he produced a plodding account of a summer canoe trip, entitled
An Englishman in Ireland
. ‘The chill mist and the distressing rain-clouds which had covered England for half the summer were gone,’ he wrote in a characteristic passage. ‘There was a transparency in the air by which every visible object gained a fine edge, and a kind of vast decorativeness in the delicately-tinted scene as if Nature had bathed and come forth glittering.’

How Rolfe persuaded Dent to publish this atrocity (for the narrative gets worse) seems mysterious to a modern reader, but the book attracted surprising enthusiasm from critics at the time. The young author became friendly with Norman Douglas, greatest travel writer of his generation. In 1912 Rolfe visited America, contributing accounts to the
Morning Leader
of Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful presidential re-election campaign. Most of the trip, however, was devoted to studying US newspapers for his book published the following year,
The Influence of the Press
. This was ponderous in tone, often absurd in substance. Almost all poor Rolfe’s judgements reflected a monumental naïveté. He convinced himself, for instance, that Britain’s newspaper proprietors had suddenly discovered God, and seen the error of their past ways:

The controllers of the popular Press have learnt the market-value of decency. They have discovered that accurate information pays; that an irresponsibly sensational manner no longer makes a sensation; that news must be news; that the largest newspaper audience in the world is not devoid of common-sense. This is the amazing discovery which has recently been dawning upon the world; and it has emanated, not from ‘respectable’ England, but from the Press which had once been called the ‘Yellow’ Press…Assuredly I hold no brief for the
Daily Mail
, but it seems to me a fact of extraordinary significance that the most popular organ in England should be adopting a policy of decency.

In the First World War, Rolfe won a Military Cross as a captain in the Royal Artillery, and published several articles about the work of the heavy guns. Norman Douglas wrote to him from his sanctuary on Capri, appropriately named Casa Solitaria, in July 1916: ‘Hope you are all right? It is very pleasant here – a great calm. Dim rumours of war going on somewhere far away. No foreigners.’ Rolfe himself, by contrast, spent almost two years on the Western Front. One of his daughter Anne’s earliest memories was of being awakened in the small hours at the family’s holiday lodgings in the little village of Burghfield Common, near Reading, by her father’s return on leave from France. Many rural communities did their best to ignore that war, and cared astonishingly little for those who were fighting it. The countryside and its people, in those days, were rather nastier than modern nostalgia acknowledges, pervaded by a parochialism often manifested in hostility to outsiders of any kind or purpose. When Rolfe, having walked seven miles through the darkness from Reading station, knocked up the landlady of a pub to ask directions, she slammed the door in his face.

Rolfe’s post-war books on English literature displayed wide reading, both ancient and modern, but Anne always urged me not to bother with them, because they are written in the style of a pedant’s pedant. ‘Literature, as regarded by a Schlegel or a Taine,’ he wrote in 1928 in a characteristic passage of
The Making of Literature
, ‘is a social product. It is circulated, or stored, for the use of all who desire to help themselves from the sum-total of finished thought-work available in men’s writing. All the parts of it are food for the mind, and collectively constitute world culture. When Coleridge said that “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher,” he was not confusing two different faculties of the mind; but he was affirming the importance of the one to the other.’

I see what Mummy meant when she urged me to skip reading her father’s works. Much of what he said is sound enough, but he expressed it in the tones P.G. Wodehouse adopted when parodying intellectual bores of the kind who terrified Bertie Wooster. Rolfe never used one word where three would do. A reviewer in the
Westminster Gazette
observed of one of his books in 1928: ‘When we finished Mr Scott-James’s work, we had a comfortable feeling that he had said the right things and said them adequately, but precisely what he had said we find it difficult to remember.’ Arnold Bennett said abruptly to Rolfe one night: ‘Scott-James, why haven’t you written a novel? You should write a novel.’ Yet when Grandfather later acted on Bennett’s advice the outcome, entitled
Knights and Knaves
, remained unpublished, as judging from the typescript it deserved to.

After the First World War, Rolfe spent a decade as a leader writer on the
Daily Chronicle
, then two years as assistant editor of
The Spectator
. In 1935 he followed J.C. Squire as editor of the
London Mercury
, the literary monthly which Squire had created, and presided until its extinction in 1939. There is no record of Rolfe ever having made a joke, either in person or in print, though he was once the recipient of a passable one. As editor of the
London Mercury
, he wrote to A.E. Housman, inviting a contribution. Housman replied: ‘I am obliged by your letter, but my career, and it is to be hoped my life, are so near their close that it is to be hoped they will concern neither of us much longer.’ The poet duly expired nine days later.

Between the wars, Rolfe bolstered his income by moonlighting as London correspondent of the American
Christian Science Monitor
, which paid him three or four guineas a time for his contributions. He reviewed books for several newspapers, and for a time wrote the Atticus column of the
Sunday Times
, eschewing any hint of frivolity. He was a dogged labourer in the literary vineyard, immensely prolific, and eventually received an OBE for his work for the British Council. A staunch lifelong Liberal and pillar of the Reform Club, his hero was Lloyd George. This represented perversity on Grandfather’s part. The austere Scott-James esteemed truthfulness above all other virtues, while Lloyd George’s dearest friends would have hesitated to claim it among his. Rolfe, a diligent researcher into educational and social conditions among the working classes, contributed to Lloyd George’s 1924 Liberal Party inquiry into the coal industry. He had a dry commitment to virtue which would have commended itself to Edward Hastings, but did not do so to his daughter Anne.

Rolfe’s wife Violet, an almost uneducated but nonetheless highly cultured woman, seems also to have found her husband unexciting, for she indulged herself with affairs on the fringes of literary London. Her origins were somewhat smarter than those of her husband. She came from a West Country family which had squandered its money on hunting and high living. Her father, Captain Arthur Brooks, was a veteran of the 13th Foot, the Somerset Light Infantry (I have always mistrusted ex-officers who cling to junior rank after retirement from the army). The captain lived in some style until his money ran out. Heaven knows what brought his daughter Violet together with Rolfe Scott-James – they married in 1905, when he was twenty-six and she twenty.

After the war, for some years she contributed a witty ‘London Letter’ to the
Yorkshire Post
, for which she served as its first women’s editor, and later as dramatic critic, writing above the coy byline ‘V.S-J’. Family folklore fails to determine whether her long liaison with the paper’s celebrated editor Arthur Mann inspired him to hire her, or whether the connection evolved the other way around. A highly strung, intense woman who suffered constant ill-health, her restlessness rendered contentment elusive for Violet. She faced the further burden that her son John was epileptic, at a period when no effective treatment existed. Responsibility for caring for him fell heavily upon Anne, who loved John dearly. She was troubled all her life by the tragedy of her brother’s plight.

In London, the family occupied a terraced house in Bayswater. During school holidays in the 1920s the three children were sent to lodge without their parents at the cottage of a retired nanny in Sulhampstead, Berkshire. Anne adored those experiences, and forged a passion for wildflowers and woodlands which she retained all her life. She loved the white roads, unmetalled ribbons of stone and dust, ‘as poignant a memory of my childhood as cowslips, kingfishers, scarecrows, collecting pinecones in a go-cart, stirring pigwash in a tub, finding heartsease and corncockle in the cornfields, or filling jamjars with tiny frogs in a stream’.