Did You Really Shoot the Television? (15 page)

Anne’s outbursts of anger were alarming, often provoked by displays of incompetence, especially those perpetrated by Mac, of which allowing the car to run out of petrol was the most commonplace. She seldom smacked me – public opinion thought her forbearance mistaken – and Father never did. Neither used any swearword stronger than ‘bloody’ or ‘damn’. But I trembled before her wrath. I can still conjure vividly the image of a night when she burst into my room in a rage and transparent negligee, to catch me reading by torchlight under the bedclothes. Until the day of her death, she perceived herself as a mild, gentle, much-put-upon little creature of the forest. I, by contrast, saw her as possessing many of the characteristics of a Sherman tank. In the school holidays, knowing how much I preferred Berkshire to London, she early adopted the practice of depositing me at the cottage for weeks on end with Nanny, and later with my sister Clare. I danced a ritual jig as she disappeared down the path en route to the city and the office. I knew that the way was thus cleared for a blissful interlude, doing exactly what I chose.

The Strand Magazine
closed in 1950. Father received a pay-off from the publishers of a year’s salary, £5,000, which caused him to feel prosperous. At forty, he embarked on a career as a freelance writer and journalist that made the ensuing decade by far the most successful of his life. He contributed hundreds of articles to a range of newspapers, continued to broadcast, edited a magazine – and published ten books. In 1950 he wrote the first of a series of detective thrillers about Montague Cork, an insurance company boss who was modelled on a friend and country neighbour named Claude Wilson. The five ‘Mr Cork’ stories which appeared in the next fifteen years sold well, even if they did not attain best-sellerdom. The first,
Cork on the Water
, set the tone. Mr Cork, a Bentley-driving, stiff-collared, late-middle-aged pillar of the City of London, investigates a dubious insurance claim following the discovery of a body in a Scottish salmon river. His inquiries take him behind the scenes at the ballet (like most of his generation Father was in love with Moira Shearer, whom he knew slightly), then into the Highlands.

The cast of characters was liberally endowed with ex-commandos and Nazi veterans, the plot with deadly duels on the heather-clad hills using stalking rifles. Mr Cork caps his triumphant resolution of the case by catching a giant salmon. More than one reviewer compared Father’s fiction debut to John Buchan’s thrillers. Almost two decades later, the book was filmed – embarrassingly badly – for BBC TV. Father wrote of a world of officers and gentlemen, sportsmen and deferential servants, which was already almost defunct. Yet he loved this milieu,
and threw into the Cork books the absolute belief in his own plotlines and characters that is indispensable to success as a creator of fiction. The next tale,
Cork in Bottle
, focused upon a mysterious shooting on a remote Norfolk estate, where incest was the principal hobby and the squire still exercised dominant power in a community without indoor sanitation or much taste for strangers.

Cork in the Doghouse
was written around the world of illegal dogfighting, ‘the fancy’, and a Staffordshire bull terrier named Honey.
Cork and the Serpent
was the least convincing of the series. It dealt with the racing world, which Father knew much less well than he supposed, and portrayed aristocrats, about whom his ideas were formed by West End stage caricature rather than personal intimacy. Nancy Mitford once said that she could not imagine how Trollope wrote so convincingly about dukes, when he did not know any. She would have withheld that accolade from Mac’s portraits of rural grandees. Nonetheless, Mr Cork was a delightfully original fictional creation. I love the books for the echoes they provide of their begetter. I hear Mac speak through every page, and cherish his evocation of the countryside in the post-war period.

The Highland fishing drama in
Cork on the Water
, for instance, is beautifully done:

When the great salmon took his fly on July 4th, 1949, Colonel Johnson, perched on his matchstick legs on the edge of a granite rock, was nearly tilted into the river. Another man would have been broken in the fish’s first rush. A lesser angler, under the driving pressure on the tackle, would have lost control immediately in the snag-strewn broken water. Even Colonel Johnson, unprepared for the fish’s cannonball strike, nearly botched it. For a breathtaking moment, in the salmon’s first upstream rush, his rod point was dipping in the river…

Likewise, Mac’s picture of romantic but wretched old East Anglia for
Cork in Bottle
remains a delight. When he wrote of such things, of places he knew and thrills he had experienced for himself, few writers
did it better. The Cork books sold modestly well in America, and were widely translated in Europe, for audiences who embraced their quintessential Englishness.

Mac’s second string, indeed one of his principal activities for most of the decade, was equally charming, yet was commercially disastrous for the family. His spell at
The Strand
had whetted his appetite for editorship. He yearned for a platform from which to proclaim his passion for rural Britain. In 1951, with financial support from optimistic friends, he launched a monthly magazine entitled
Country Fair
. He acquired offices in Lowndes Street behind Knightsbridge, a Land Rover adorned with the magazine’s logo, and persuaded Angela Mack to follow him from
The Strand
as his secretary. He enlisted some splendid names as contributors: ‘B.B.’ on shooting, Roy Beddington on fishing, Constance Spry on gardening, James Robertson Justice on falconry, A.G. Street on farming. Arthur Street, a robust Wiltshire farmer whose country writings were already famous, was credited as co-editor, to give credibility to the new creation among genuine rustics.

The magazine looked enchanting. Its covers were adorned with animal caricatures drawn by Hanna. Its photographs reflected the eye for an image which Father had developed on
Picture Post
, and honed at
The Strand
. He wrote all the captions himself, and wonderfully wry and witty they were. Each month the magazine carried a long essay on a chosen English county, written by one of its most prominent literary residents – H.E. Bates on Kent, Anthony Armstrong on Sussex, John Betjeman on Berkshire and suchlike. Over the seven years of Mac’s stewardship,
Country Fair
created a portrait of a vanishing rural England, its ways and personalities. It provided a showcase for his prejudices, whimsies and enthusiasms.

Yet, like most such self-indulgent ventures, it never made money. By 1954 it had accumulated a loss of £17,000, which increased annually thereafter. Having pushed his own overdraft to the limit to fund the magazine, and exhausted Arthur Street’s cautious willingness to invest, Mac dunned friends for support in a fashion that embarrassed and irked Anne. ‘You know perfectly well that Connie Spry doesn’t have much money. How can you take £500 off her?’ she rebuked him bitterly.
In some respects Mac was the least ruthless of men, but his passion to keep
Country Fair
afloat swept aside his scruples. He solicited cheques for the magazine wherever he could get them, always believing that one more heave at sales and advertising would secure his creation’s future. He loved the magazine like a baby – more, indeed, than any baby in our family – as a blissful expression of his own personality. It was a bitter blow when at last in 1957 the magazine had to be sold for a song.

Anne referred for years afterwards to ‘that awful
Country Fair
’, a drain on the family finances. For the first few issues she herself contributed a jolly column under the heading ‘The Weekender’. But when she perceived the magazine’s commercial failure, she turned away to get on with making her own living. Many things progressively poisoned her marriage to Mac, but
Country Fair
was prominent among them. Anne, a tough realist, felt increasing disgust that Father’s self-indulgence threatened to ruin the family, as well as to squander his own talents for no reward. Mac’s travails as a magazine publisher exercised a powerful influence on my own career. They convinced me that God is with the big battalions. Almost every journalist, and indeed editor, is best advised to attach himself to the payroll of the richest possible press lord, rather than strike out bravely on his own. Few writers have commercial gifts capable of carrying them beyond the manufacture of expense claims.

Mac, always prolific, contributed regularly to other people’s magazines such as
Woman
and
John Bull
. His greatest success of the early 1950s, however, was the most surprising. One day he was summoned to a meeting at the Savoy with the Reverend Marcus Morris. Morris was an implausible parson, who fathered four children by his beautiful wife, an actress, while pursuing one of the more energetic and exotic love lives in contemporary London. He also possessed remarkable gifts of salesmanship, which enabled him to persuade the publisher of
Picture Post
, Sir Edward Hulton, that he could create an entirely new kind of children’s publication, which preached virtue and godliness alongside top-quality strip cartoon stories and journalism. He would bring class to comics. Part of the vision of Morris, a near-genius in his brief season, was that his weekly paper should
include real-life adventure reporting. Teddy Hulton, who had formed an admiration for Mac’s courage as well as his reporting abilities during their
Picture Post
years together, suggested his name to Morris. At
The Strand
, Mac had penned the Sydney Sparrow stories for children. He had the gift of addressing a young audience without condescension, indeed with confiding frankness, together with a breathless delight in novelty that transmitted itself to his readers. Sydney Sparrow had been part of my infancy. Now, Father’s exploits for the new Hulton ‘comic’ began to loom large in my boyhood.

When Marcus Morris’s boys’ paper
Eagle
burst upon the news stands in 1951, from its first issue Mac was a star contributor, with the title of ‘
Eagle
Special Investigator’. While the front page was dominated by the doings of Dan Dare, a fantasy cartoon spaceman, inside Mac described each week a real-life venture into some job or experience likely to capture the imagination of children. Through the early years of
Eagle
’s stunning success, he recounted how he learned to scuba dive, became a ‘living firework’, joined the fire brigade, traversed Arctic wastes with the Canadian Mounties, explored London’s sewers, caught a salmon, trained with the Household Cavalry, submerged in a submarine, drove a coach and six, rode with the great jockey Gordon Richards, survived St Moritz’s Cresta Run, tried to be a cowboy in Calgary, helmed a motor torpedo boat, drove a racing car under Stirling Moss’s tuition, rode a camel with the Arab Legion and many other sensations besides.

His feature prospered mightily, making him a hero to a generation of schoolboys, and of course to me. His collected articles sold well as books –
Eagle Special Investigator
and
Adventure Calling
. Marcus Morris’s paper for some years maintained a huge circulation, and spawned a brood of sister publications catering to different target groups of children –
Girl
,
Swift
and
Robin
. Collectively, they represented an extraordinary achievement by Teddy Hulton. It was a tragedy that their packages of history, potted biography, adventure and skilfully presented morality tales for children, brilliantly edited, written and illustrated, survived only until the knowing, cynical, and in most respects deeply nasty ’sixties.

Many journalists would have been mortally embarrassed to perform pantomime stunts for the amusement of children. Never so Mac. In print as in life, his brand of innocence rendered him impervious to blushes. His success in the role was rooted in the fact that his readers could perceive that he loved every moment of being paid to fulfil his own fantasies. He was taught to fly a Tiger Moth biplane by Joan Hughes, an instructor who had been one of the wartime stars of the Women’s Air Transport Auxiliary, and who said ‘Jolly good show’ when they met. On their first flight together, at 2,000 feet Joan said: ‘OK – you’ve got her.’ Mac wrote: ‘Suddenly, the thing which, in Joan’s hands, had behaved like a tame swallow, began to bucket in the air. The wings swayed drunkenly, the nose reared up and down and the needles on the bank and turn indicator swung about in agonised protest. I wobbled the stick, I fiddled about with the trimmer and, finally, I put my foot hard down on the rudder, in the hope that it might work like a brake.’ He eventually mastered the plane, of course, and after eighteen hours’ dual instruction at White Waltham airfield near Maidenhead, graduated to flying solo, dressed in the approved manner of Biggles, with leather helmet and sheepskin flying jacket.

As a circus knife-thrower’s target, ‘Stripped to the waist I stood against the board in the darkness, feeling exactly like any paleface in a Redskin encampment. Hal swung the flaming hatchets in the air and performed a sort of war dance. I pressed my bare back against the splintered board and held my hands locked together in front of me as tightly as if I were bound at the wrists. I shall never forget the swish of those hatchets. They flew towards me, spinning through the air in flaming arcs, and the blades bit into the wood with force enough to fell a tree.’ On the Cresta Run a few weeks later, ‘I was hanging on for dear life and we were swinging round a bank of ice like a wall of death. I completely forgot to change the position of my hands as I’d been told to. I just dug in my rakes and held on for dear life as the toboggan made another knife-edged turn underneath me. I was out of Battledore and sizzling up the steep banking of Shuttlecock, on the second leg of an S-turn.’

His grinning features became famous to a generation of schoolboys,
peering from a tank turret, the cab of a Canadian Pacific locomotive, the cockpit of a racing car, the back of a camel and the ‘box’ of a husky-drawn dogsled in the Arctic. He was the forerunner of a legion of modern television hosts who perform stunts in the same fashion, though I doubt whether any gains as much pleasure from his experiences as Mac did.
Eagle
also paid well: in 1952 he was making almost £5,000 a year from Hulton – a retainer of £2,000, plus fifty guineas an article.

As a child, my awe of Father was rooted in his fame as
Eagle
Special Investigator. Schoolmates teased me mercilessly about the chasm between my own physical clumsiness, most notable on the games field, and Mac’s weekly masquerade as Superman. I read his accounts of derring-do with painful consciousness of my own inability to match them. This helps to explain why, after leaving school, I lavished so much of my energy on overcoming terror, and myself learned to parachute, ride the Cresta Run, steeplejack and otherwise make terms with the demons conjured by Father’s doings.

The combination of
Eagle
,
Country Fair
, Mr Cork, regular broadcasting and occasional contributions to newspapers made Mac a widely recognised figure in the early 1950s. Though his heart was in the countryside, he also enjoyed the world of London clubs and restaurants. He lived upon a principle that was the antithesis of Groucho Marx’s. Any club that would admit Mac became, in his eyes, the cynosure of exclusivity and excellence. He shared Basil’s enthusiasm for the Savage, then in Carlton House Terrace, with its matey and – from a less roseate perspective than his own – somewhat
passé
congregation of writers, artists, actors and publishers. He also patronised the Beefsteak, in its weird Gothic timbered hall at the foot of Leicester Square. He was a faithful attendee at the twice-yearly dinners of the Saintsbury, a mixture of writers and wine buffs who sampled prodigious quantities of great vintages at the Vintners’ Hall. When he worked in an office off Knightsbridge, for a few years he patronised the nearby Royal Thames Yacht Club, an odd choice for a Hastings, since we are a landlubbing tribe.