Did You Really Shoot the Television? (12 page)

The nine-page piece which followed, accompanied by brilliant photographs taken by Leonard McCombe, was probably Mac’s best dispatch of the war.
Picture Post
’s writers were usually credited in small print at the foot of their copy, but by that date his byline was appearing at the head of his words. His pieces received star billing through the rest of the campaign in North-West Europe.

In the summer of 1944, Steve Hastings began to feel guilty about his absence from the fighting war. He volunteered for service behind the German lines with Special Operations Executive, and was dispatched first to Algiers, thence to Paris, to await an assignment in the field. There was a long wait, much of it amid the fleshpots, which did nothing to assuage his discomfort about being absent both from his battalion, by now fighting in Italy, and from his old SAS comrades. He was flown to Brindisi, destined to join the Italian partisans. There, more heel-kicking followed, which caused Steve to seek amusement in a characteristic family fashion: ‘One day, somebody reported having seen a fox. We spun into action, collected four or five scrawny horses, a mule, and about three couple of assorted mongrels, which we encouraged with bully-beef before setting forth for the chase. The
Brindisi Vale hounds only met twice and, as their Huntsman, I could not claim much success. Several cats were given a nasty turn but escaped. Much abrasive red wine was drunk; we scampered about among the scrub oak, olive and carob trees by the shore, but of the foxes there was no sign.’

On the night of 3 February 1945, Steve and his team were parachuted by American Liberator into the Ligurian Apennines, near San Stefano d’Aveto, thirty miles inland from Portofino. He landed in a pine tree, but was mercifully undamaged, likewise his cockney wireless operator, Sergeant Chalky White. Then they loaded their kit onto mules supplied by the partisans’ reception committee, and set off into the mountains. Steve operated under the orders of two other British officers, Basil Davidson and Peter McMullen. As so often with SOE operations, they found themselves struggling with labyrinthine local political complications. All the Italians hated the Germans, but most hated each other almost as bitterly. Two of Steve’s bodyguard resigned in disgust because, as good communists, they disliked the British officers’ custom of eating separately from the men. McMullen, who trusted the locals not at all, found it difficult to work with Davidson, a professed Marxist, who embraced them. Steve, as a twenty-three-year-old captain then oblivious of politics, was merely bemused by it all. One day he met an elderly partisan leading a mule carrying three 75mm shells. Steve demanded: where was the gun? He received a theatrical shrug: ‘
Non lo so, io
’ – I don’t know. Then the old boy brightened up: ‘
Fa niente, Signor Maggiore
. When we get down there, we’ll find a gun that fits.’

In the last weeks of the war, as the German armies in Italy approached collapse, the partisans embarked on ever more daring operations, hitting enemy garrisons wherever they could. At Groppallo, the SOE team appropriated a large German open staff car, loaded a partisan colonel aboard along with themselves, and hastened down the valley towards Bettola. Then they drove on towards Piacenza, which they reached on 25 April. Steve saw before him a pair of great wrought-iron gates protecting a huge Renaissance castle. This belonged, he was told reverently, to that great nobleman the Duke
of Grazzano. Steve walked up to the front door, to be greeted by the tall, thin, elegant figure of the duke himself. Steve apologised for the intrusion. ‘It is nothing,’ shrugged His Grace in impeccable English. ‘I am delighted to see you. It has been very difficult here. The Germans requisitioned one wing, and I had the partisans from time to time in the other. Will you have tea or coffee?’

In the last stages of the battle for Piacenza on 29 April, Steve drove to the headquarters of the US 135th Infantry, and explained to a bemused American colonel that the partisans controlled most of the area. Steve was proud of the contribution his Italians made to the capture of the city, fighting harder than ever before. As the Germans were forced out, he drove into Piacenza and commandeered an office in the splendid Palazzo del Commune. A few weeks later, after riotous celebrations, he returned to England.

Lewis’s last memorable encounter of the war took place in the spring of 1945 near Hanover, where he entered a large country house to find himself in the presence of Field-Marshal August von Mackensen, a famous German commander of the First World War, by then aged over ninety. The two hoary old veterans enjoyed a long and convivial talk, interpreted by the Field-Marshal’s daughter-in-law, who spoke English. The Junker, as Lewis categorised him, welcomed the arrival of the British with warm enthusiasm, having been fearful of the Russians. He would say nothing unflattering about his late Führer, however, except to regret that Hitler had not heeded the General Staff, which might have prompted a different outcome of the war. Mackensen became extremely heated in his denunciation of the Americans, who had no grievance against Germany. ‘Why did they want to come and interfere in the war between us and Britain?’ the old man demanded crossly. Lewis felt moved to describe some of the scenes he had recently witnessed in Belsen concentration camp. The Field-Marshal lapsed into a sulky silence which persisted until his British visitor departed.

Lewis perceived the war in intensely romantic terms – indeed, he embraced the Churchillian vision that it formed part of a great
historic pageant. Watching a British infantry company advancing into an attack through the flickering red and orange light of shellfire in Sicily in 1943, Lewis studied the faces of the men with rapt attention: ‘It was England going by – it was Blenheim, it was Salamanca, it was the Heights of Abraham, the Somme, Deville Wood, the Salient. I had seen them all before, the same breed in the same strange illumination. Fathers and sons, they were cut out of the same block, and they were worthy of one another.’ Major Hastings finished his war by walking alone into Bremen Town Hall, armed with a walking stick with which he afterwards claimed to have belaboured the resident Nazi officials. Lewis had twenty years left to live, but for him nothing was ever quite as good again. Peace brought the introduction of a permanent close season on Germans, and the old hunter was now too long in the tooth to return to his beloved bush.

In April 1945, Mac delivered a lyrical BBC broadcast to North America about the glories of the English spring:

What I would like to do this week is to take you down to my cottage and show you the garden. As gardens go, there is nothing very remarkable about it. As I have been in Germany during those vital weeks when I ought to have been mowing the grass, pruning the roses, hoeing the leeks, we are rather behindhand with the vital work. But for all that, I would like to show you my garden because this is the time of year in England when gardens ought to be seen, when their peculiar magic is seen at its best, with a fragile loveliness which the patina of time has a lot to do with.

An English cottage garden is not the work of one man; it is the reward of the loving toil and patience of generations. In my garden, I do not know who planted the daffodils in the bank, put in the hedges, planted the old yew just outside the front door. All I am sure about is that the ghosts of all the dear old gardeners from the time of William the Norman – when another habitation stood where my cottage now stands – from the days of the Crusaders, who are buried in the little church opposite, to the Georgians who built the present cottage – all
I know is that their ghosts – call it the aura of their love, if you like – haunt the cottage now. You can hear them whispering in the gentle spring breeze. You can almost see them lifting the nodding heads of the daffodils and tulips to see how they are coming along. And, at evening time in that wonderful, still air after an April shower, you could almost swear that somebody was moving among the rosebeds.

It is surprising for me to be on this subject, isn’t it? I am almost surprised myself. For five and a half years, I have talked and written, broadcast and made speeches, about nothing but war. I have followed a trail of destruction. Nothing else has really seemed important by comparison with war. Yet now, at last, peace is coming into the news again. Funny the way it gets you. I think the first half-conscious thought was during the crossing of the Rhine. I caught myself saying to my neighbour in the boat: ‘It would be silly to get killed now.’ I do not think he heard what I said through the ear-splitting noise of the barrage; but he sensed the meaning all right, and grinned and smiled.

It is one of the mercies of this terrible war, in which so much of Europe’s great heritage has been destroyed, that the riches of the English countryside have survived almost untouched. The descendants of Shakespeare’s swans are still gracing the waters of Avon. Wordsworth’s dancing daffodils are in full bloom again. Shelley’s skylark is nesting. And, to prove that all our memories are not in the past, there are the bomb craters in the rolling wheatfields around Dover, to remind us that we have a present – and a future, too.

Even Mac, with his boundless appetite for sensation, was sated by the experience of war. He now had far more to stay alive for than ever he did in 1939. He prepared to enjoy his own fruits of victory.

It is easy to see why Mac married Anne. She was beautiful, clever, witty, effective, a merciless realist. She professed an enthusiasm for the rural life so dear to his heart. It is harder to perceive what Anne saw in Mac. A droll observer might note that he, like Derek Verschoyle, was the enthusiastic and somewhat reckless owner of a .22 rifle, but that can scarcely have been her sole criterion for picking husbands. For all his gifts and charm, Mac was a fantasist of heroic proportions about the society in which he lived, and about his own place in the scheme of things. His aesthetic interests were much slighter than his wife’s. She gained an early insight into his priorities when, soon after they were married, she heard him remark loudly at a party: ‘I’ve got the three things I wanted most – a Churchill gun, a Hardy rod and a beautiful wife.’ Anne decided that the relationship lacked depth of feeling on her side, and probably also on Mac’s. She wrote: ‘I strongly resented being counted as a chattel with a gun and a rod, and retreated more and more into my private thoughts.’ Mac’s taste for self-delusion extended to marriage. He enjoyed the idea of living with a clever woman, but had no intention of changing his habits to accommodate her, to assist in the fulfilment of her own ambitions and needs.

His admiration for Anne’s talents was unbounded. Many times later, he said to me, ‘You should know that your mother is the most successful woman journalist in Fleet Street.’ Whether or not this was true, Mac believed it to be so. But rather than regarding their marriage as a partnership, he perceived himself as having coupled Anne to the
engine of his own life, and thus expected her to follow him up whatever lines and branches he chose to explore. In Anne’s old age, I asked her to explain the marriage. After a pause, she said: ‘Lots of people married the wrong people in the war. Your father cut quite a glamorous figure in battledress. I realised that I was never going to have the sort of great romantic partnership I’d dreamed of. I thought’ – further pause for ironic, indeed acid, reflection – ‘your father would be
a good parent to children
.’

Soon after they began living together, she gained a foretaste of social difficulties ahead. By an odd chance, Rosamond Lehmann had bought a cottage in Aldworth next door to Anne’s. Its location was originally chosen in order for the novelist to be within driving distance of her then lover, Goronwy Rees. She kept Diamond Cottage for five years, latterly much in residence with Rees’s successor in her affections, Cecil Day-Lewis, who was once sighted by the Hastingses picking mushrooms in a heavy city overcoat, and carrying an umbrella. To Anne, Lehmann seemed ‘as surreal a vision in our quiet village as a magnolia in a cornfield. Rosamond loved the country as a source of aesthetic experience, and appreciated every wisp of pink cloud made rosy by the sunset and every diamond circle frozen by frost on thaw. But she had lived formerly in manor houses with gardeners and cooks to protect her from the harsher realities of village life, and had no more idea how to sow broad beans or pluck a pheasant than I had of how to write a tragic novel.’

Lehmann’s visitors were many and lyrical, mostly poets. Exotically beautiful, she was haloed in curls of blue-rinsed hair – it had gone white in her twenties – framing a serious face with enormous eyes, full lips and perfect skin, of which Anne claimed to be envious. She dressed strikingly, even during the war, in cherry-red trousers with an angora sweater outlining her ripe figure. ‘Her voice was soft, her
bon-mots
, not always free from malice, uttered almost in gasps. The difficulty about Rosamond as a neighbour was that she was so exquisitely sensitive that she made everyone else feel plain thick.’ Lehmann rubbed along well enough with Anne – she had some liking and respect for Rolfe, her father. But, in Anne’s words, ‘She quickly
dismissed Mac as an oaf.’ His lack of tact, as well as of plausible literary credentials, created tensions. He was capable, for instance, of articulating in Rosamond’s presence, as he often did amid company at large, his belief that the only entirely convincing male literary character created by a woman was Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel.

One morning early in their acquaintance, the two were chatting across the boundary hedge. Rosamond professed to apologise for the sorry state of her garden. Mac readily agreed: ‘Yes, it is pretty awful. You’ll have to dig it all up and weed it from end to end.’ This was not well received. One Sunday, the Hastingses were invited to lunch. The day began unpromisingly when Mac apprehended Rosamond’s house guest Laurie Lee picking snowdrops in Rose Cottage’s garden, and summarily evicted him. When lunchtime came, the guests were presented with a leg of lamb, an almost unheard-of treat, every rationed morsel precious. After the first time around, Rosamond said pointedly, ‘Will anyone have some more of these lovely vegetables?’ Mac seized the opportunity to take revenge for Laurie Lee’s depredations. ‘Yes, please,’ he said, ‘and I’ll have more lamb, too.’ He was alleged to be the only man in Aldworth impervious to Rosamond’s charms.

The careers of both Hastingses were prospering, however. Mac wrote a column under the pseudonym ‘Lemuel Gulliver’ for
Lilliput
, a notably intelligent pocket magazine of the time, like
Picture Post
owned by Edward Hulton. Soon after the war ended, another publisher, Newnes, invited him to resuscitate the monthly
Strand Magazine
, once the stage for Sherlock Holmes and now fallen upon hard times. He was offered a handsome salary as editor – £5,000 a year – and quit
Picture Post
. Having entered one of his prosperous periods, he indulged a rush of new Savile Row suits, handmade shoes, firearms and other impedimenta indispensable to the man-about-town-and-country. He then addressed
The Strand
with energy and flair. It was a middlebrow illustrated topical magazine, like
Lilliput
published in pocket format. Mac, always possessed of a good eye, had honed this on
Picture Post
. Besides using photographs well, he employed Edward Ardizzone as lead illustrator, and made the
magazine a showcase of the best new-generation artistic talent: Le Broquy, Osbert Lancaster, Ronald Searle, Michael Ayrton, Terence Cuneo.

Most months,
The Strand
carried a detective story by the likes of Georges Simenon, Peter Cheyney or John Dickson Carr. Other contributors included Evelyn and Alec Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Anthony Powell – for instance, choosing his thirty books of the year – Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge. James Laver wrote on the future of men’s clothes, Nicholas Davenport under the headline ‘Has the Rich Man had it?’ John Betjeman not only published poems, but wrote prose pieces which included a profile of Evelyn Waugh. Max Beerbohm contributed drawings and an occasional essay, Robert Graves wrote poems. Mac exploited family connections without embarrassment – he persuaded Anne to write articles, and invited Lewis to perform regularly.

Mac’s own work appeared in most issues. He wrote a series of conversations focused upon Mr Quill, habitué of a London pub saloon bar. These were brilliantly illustrated by Ardizzone at his best. Nothing if not versatile, Mac also composed for
The Strand
a dozen charming
short stories for children about a magic London cockney bird named Sydney Sparrow and a little girl named Boo, with drawings by Betty Swanwick. One coup came the magazine’s way without editorial inspiration. Among the mass of unsolicited manuscripts that arrived at its offices, the editor’s secretary, a clever ex-Wren named Angela Mack, noticed a fat collection of papers in early-nineteenth-century handwriting. They had been submitted by a reader who found them in an attic, and wondered if anyone might be interested. Miss Mack glanced, became absorbed, and realised that she was handling treasure trove. These were letters, hundreds of them, written by a soldier who served in Wellington’s army through the Peninsula and Waterloo campaigns. Extracts were published in
The Strand
, and later as a book,
The Letters of Private Wheeler
, which is today recognised as the outstanding British ranker’s memoir of the Napoleonic Wars.

Mac relished the opportunity which The Strand conferred on him to commission some of the finest talents of the day. From the outset, however, he found himself struggling against the economic tide. All publications have a natural span. Once this approaches its end, life-support systems seldom suffice to reverse a steep decline in
circulation.
The Strand
, founded in 1891, had prospered most notably during the first thirty years of the twentieth century. Thereafter it became a loss-maker, and remained so throughout Mac’s editorship. The only question was how long Newnes, its owners, would go on paying the bills. Meanwhile, Mac enjoyed the ride.

In April 1945, Anne left
Picture Post
to become editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
, on a salary of £1,500 a year. Although she enjoyed the glossy magazine world much less than the newsprint one, she made a considerable success of the job. Thinking poorly of English fashion at that period, when there was anyway little in the shops for women to buy, she sought to broaden the magazine’s range of general features, commissioning such new writers as Elizabeth David and John Mortimer, as well as rising stars – John Betjeman, Lesley Blanch, Eric Ambler. One of Betjeman’s contributions for her was a poem about Christmas. ‘You won’t like it, old girl,’ he said, ‘it’s rather religious. It’s also rather long. In fact, I don’t think it’s any good at all. Don’t feel obliged to use it. How do I look in the snaps?
Such
a nice photographer. I hope he took me out of focus.’ I hear John B’s voice now, when I read those characteristic words of self-deprecation, preserved by Anne. By an odd twist of fate, sixty years later I found myself asked to read that very poem, which has become one of Betjeman’s most celebrated, at a charity carol service in Newbury.

Anne was the first to put Elizabeth David’s work into print. As she told David’s biographer long after, ‘she struck exactly the right moment. There was freedom again and the expectation of holidays once more, without ghastly restrictions or bombs. She wrote beautifully, right from the start. You could smell the shrimps, hear the fishwives talking on the quay. There was this feeling that she wasn’t thinking about how to do it, but was always associating it with places

– with mountains, ports, beautiful villages. There was a Proustian quality about it.’ David’s opening piece, in March 1949, was headed ‘Rice Again’, and celebrated its return to the shops after a long, long absence. She described a recipe for risotto ‘which I took down while watching it being cooked by the
padrona
in a quayside restaurant in Alassio’. This was a characteristic David flourish, wildly exotic in the grey, rationed Britain of those days. Nonetheless, Anne found the great cook among the most difficult contributors she used. She wrote: ‘For the evocative prose, the scholar’s knowledge, the imagination which turned cookery writing into literature, I would put up with almost anything, and indeed did so for a long period. But Elizabeth
could never understand that there comes a moment in the birth of any publication when it simply has to go to press.’ Anne found David exasperatingly demanding about length – she seemed to assume that a page could be expanded to fit her words – as well as insouciant about meeting deadlines.

Harper’s
also used the historian Elizabeth Longford’s work, and Anne was delighted by her modesty: ‘She always seemed pleased to be asked, whereas many contributors would take on a job as a favour.’ In Anne’s experience as an editor, the most distinguished writers were the easiest and most professional: once they had agreed a fee and a length, their words appeared without fuss. It was the amateurs, famous names who were not professionals, who made heaviest weather of filling a page.

Like most British editors of American parent publications, Anne learned to dread the descents of grandees from New York. Carmel Snow,
Harper’s
notoriously awful editor-in-chief, cabled ahead of one visit that she wished to meet Graham Greene, who Anne knew slightly from pre-war days. Anne duly arranged a three-handed lunch with the novelist at the Dorchester, at which she cringed while Snow made heavy-handed literary advances. Greene responded civilly enough, but Anne was wholly unsurprised when he afterwards rejected all offers of commissions, even with lavish cheques attached.

Mac and Anne enjoyed that period when both were running magazines, making good money, and perceived as one of the glamour couples of their trade. Their relationship experienced an interlude of relative stability, though I doubt whether Mother ever experienced a sensation as commonplace as contentment. I was conceived in March 1945, when the approaching end of the war in Europe made parenthood seem a more promising prospect than it had done in years past. Anne found it difficult to cope with her job and pregnancy, especially when maternity clothes were almost unobtainable. She was always hungry, craving meat in those rationed days. I was born on 28 December. She wrote later: ‘Max was an impetuous character even at the foetus stage…always in a rush, he arrived two weeks early.’ While Anne was still in hospital, late one night at their flat in Chelsea, Mac seized a few sheets of paper, on the back of which he had been scribbling
ideas and lists of contributors for the redesigned
Strand
. He wrote a letter to his newborn son, sealed it in an envelope, filed it away, and presented it to me on my twenty-first birthday. Its tone reflected all Father’s enthusiasm, delusions of family grandeur, and serene assurance that life – in this case, my life – would conform to his own romantic vision.

Monday Dec 31st 1945, 69 Swan Court

My dear boy, I am writing this letter to you on New Year’s Eve while you are exactly three days old. I’m alone in our flat. Your mother in the hospital has been put to sleep early because she’s become rather overtired with the effort of feeding you. You yourself are lying in your cot in the babies’ nursery, with rows of other people’s babies all around you, blowing bubbles and working your arms as if your face was covered with cobwebs.

The nurses in the hospital have christened you ‘the elephant’ because, when you were born, you weighed 8lb 8oz. The surgeon who delivered you was a man named Peel, one of the fashionable and expensive gynaecologists of the day, and the head man at King’s College. You were born within a short walk of the place where I was born myself, and within a stone’s throw of the house where your great-grandparents lived and your grandfather – my father – was brought up.

By the time you read this, you’ll know all about your forebears (or I hope you will) because you spring from distinguished and brilliant families on both sides. And, privately, you can afford to be proud of it, but don’t boast about it to too many people. They won’t like it and they’ll use it against you. If you’re a success in the world, they’ll say that with such a background, it was only to be expected. If you’re a failure, they’ll compare you unfavourably with the Scott-James’s and the Mac Hastings’s who went before.

Because of your background and because it seems possible that you may inherit the literary bent of your mother, your father, both your mother’s parents and your father’s father, at this moment we’re giving serious consideration to your name, which in the
literary world means your fortune. Your grandfather on my side was christened Basil, to his lifelong disgust. But it served him right because he christened me Douglas. It didn’t matter much because all the world has called us ‘Mac’. And your mother and I are thinking that, if you follow in my footsteps, you’ll probably be called Mac by your friends too. Your mother’s tired of Mac. So our idea at the moment is to compromise and christen you Max; full name Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings. This nomenclature will allow you to adopt any of the following combinations you fancy:

Max Hastings

Hugh Hastings

Macdonald Hastings

You ought to like one of the three. Hugh was the name of your great grandfather on my side, who was a don in classics at London University and fought in the American Civil War [this was characteristic fantasising on Father’s part]. Macdonald was the family name of your paternal great-grandmother, who was one of the authentic Macdonalds of Glencoe [more fantasising] – and who died of bad temper. But you’ll hear of most of these things in the normal course of growing-up. What I want to put down for you now is what your mother and I almost certainly will have got out of focus by the time this letter comes into your hands – how we’re feeling, what we’re thinking now, at the beginning of your life.

As I write, your mother is 32 and I’m 36. Your mother, whom I met in the early part of 1941 when she became the Woman’s Editor of a magazine called
Picture Post
, is now running a fashion magazine called
Harper’s Bazaar,
and the youngest editor in London. So you can say that you were in the editorial chair while you were still in the womb. Everybody has admired your mother’s bravery in brilliantly editing a paper at the same time she was carrying you. You should know that she is also regarded as one of the most beautiful women in London.

In my own career, you’ve arrived in a betwixt and between time. The war is just over and, after five years as a war correspondent, I’ve got tired of running around the world (at any rate, for the moment). Just now, I’m working on a dummy issue of an entirely new magazine to be based on the old
Strand.
It ought to be published some time next year. But, by the time you read this, whether it’s a success or failure won’t matter very much.
The Strand
probably won’t exist any more.

Financially, we’re well off at the present time; which is lucky for you because, as a result of the war, everything is in short supply and what you can buy costs the earth. Your mother has been off her head to get together a layette for you. And I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t mentioned the problem in a broadcast I do every week to America called ‘London Letter’. Just a hint that we were having a baby brought parcels of baby clothes from all over the world. So your first wardrobe comes from America, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Jamaica. Your first hairbrush came from, I think, the Middle West.

We’ve got two lovely homes for you to come to when you leave the hospital; the flat in Chelsea, littered with your mother’s collection of old china (which I imagine you’ll have smashed long before you read this) and the cottage in Berkshire. The cottage – Rose Cottage, Aldworth, near Reading – is your mother’s property. It’s a lovely place in the heart of the Downs and we both hope that it’s going to be the address where you spend your childhood. Already, Rose Cottage has hundreds of happy associations for us and I hope that it’ll have a lifetime of happy associations for you. We mean never to part with it. We feel especially possessive about the cottage at the moment, because you’ve come into the world at one of the strangest and most dangerous hours in human history. Believe me, it’s needed some courage to bring you into it at all. But we’ve argued, your mother and I, that as we’re not afraid of the future, you won’t be afraid either, so here you are.

Europe, at the end of 1945, is back in the Dark Ages. The development of the atom bomb, the first one of which was dropped on
Hiroshima this year, has introduced a new and haunting fear. As I write, nothing is easier to believe than that Russia and America will be at war in the Far East before you read these words. Britain, as a result of two wars, is bankrupt. In my lifetime, this country from being the richest country in the world has become one of the poorest. Now, we’re having to negotiate a loan of a thousand million pounds from America to tide us over the years of recovery. But, inevitably, we’re going to have an anxious economy which will extend, I’m afraid, right into your own grown-up life.

Nobody will ever forget this year in which you are born. It has marked the end of the Second World War (I was crossing the Rhine with the allied armies only a few months ago); the coming of atomic energy; the election of the first Labour government with an overall majority (your mother voted Labour against my wishes!); the death of Roosevelt and the passing of Churchill from political power.

For your mother and I, this year has meant an important change in both our own careers and, above all, it’s meant the coming of you. It’s made us very happy. I’m going to fold this letter now, still wet from my pen, unread by anybody, even your mother – and put it away till you’re old enough to value it for what it is. Meanwhile, good luck to you, my boy. And a good life.

Your loving father.