Did You Really Shoot the Television? (17 page)

When marriages turn sour, sexual infidelity may be a proximate grievance, but the root cause is most often loss of respect on one side or both. While Mac sustained a deep admiration for Anne, he was far too selfish about his own enthusiasms to take much heed of her desires. He was shameless in allowing her income to take the strain for his own financial follies,
Country Fair
prominent among them. He made no attempt to adjust his lifestyle to his fluctuating fortunes, and merely passed an increasing proportion of school bills across the dinner table to his wife.

The couple gave occasional little media dinner parties at the flat, impeccably arranged by Anne and catered by her German cook, Martha, whose pastry I remember with veneration. The Hastingses were broke in a very English upper-middle-class way. There might be lobster for dinner guests, but the flats were always rented. In the early post-war years it never occurred to them to buy property. By the mid-1950s, for all their celebrity and relatively large incomes – at least £12,000 a year between them – in those days of high taxation
they lacked ready cash to buy a London home. They continued to sustain a pretence of partnership, but seldom slept under the same roof. Though each was photographed constantly in the course of their professional lives, scarcely a single image exists of them posing together as a couple. There is no shot of them with Clare and me, their children, because the four of us never functioned as a unit save for the occasional viewing of an old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie on Christmas TV, or a weekend game of mahjong.

‘My relations with your father worsened as it became increasingly clear that we had few interests or beliefs in common,’ Anne acknowledged to Clare in an open letter which she published in 1993. I often wondered why my parents did not separate in the mid-1950s, when the relationship had already become loveless, on my mother’s side anyway. In part, I think, it was that divorce in those times was perceived as a much graver step than it is considered today – and also that each of them had already racked up one failed marriage. Apart, they would have been even more stretched financially than they were together, with school fees to be paid. Above all, rightly or wrongly, they perceived an unhappily shared household as better for Clare and me than a broken one. Anne wrote: ‘For years I fostered the conventional hope that our children would be a sufficient bond, but in this I was disappointed.’

The consequence was that the marriage stumbled on, in an atmosphere of sustained rancour which we all came to take for granted. Long after, Mother observed sardonically: ‘There was nothing wrong with your father that a good psychiatrist could not have sorted out.’ This was her perception from a relatively early stage of their marriage, and unlikely to form a basis for happiness or even a tenable truce. She asserted that ‘If our marriage was inwardly barren, it was rarely acrimonious.’ But gestures of love, or even goodwill, were never discernible between her and Mac. Their relationship was sterile. Clare and I accepted it for the usual reason that children do: we knew nothing else.

‘The cottage’, as we always called it, was our haven from every childhood trouble, the scene of almost all my own happiness – and of some dramas and misfortunes. It was a modest enough place, built into the side of a chalk slope some fifty miles west of London, a brisk walk from the escarpment where the Berkshire Downs fall away steeply towards the Thames at Goring. When my mother first acquired it in 1938, it was an unimproved farmworker’s dwelling with earthen floor and outdoor sanitation. Over the years that followed it was rebuilt, extended and furnished with her usual excellent taste. It had three small bedrooms above, one of them Mother’s, and one downstairs for Father. This arrangement seemed at the time perfectly normal, but prompts a sigh from me now. There was a single low-beamed living space, created by knocking together the former parlour and sitting room, and a little kitchen with a coke-fired Esse cooker. The garden was tended by Dobson, a neighbouring farmworker, invariably clad in an old beret, battledress jacket and aura of grumpiness. His wife, Mrs Dobson, acted as housekeeper, did the cleaning and a little cooking.

In the early years of my childhood, when food rationing was severe, the grass tennis court was given over to chickens. It was rehabilitated for white flannels and the kiss of racquets on balls only during a brief phase around 1950 when Mac and Anne attempted to make some show of conducting conventional country social life together. The court then again sank into decay, in step with their relationship. We owned a pretty Guernsey cow named Carmen which grazed a neighbouring field, providing milk and butter until she ran dry and was
pronounced too old to calve again. Mother had designed the garden with some flair. In 1945 she added a mildly exotic touch by enlisting the services of local German prisoners-of-war, then readily available as cheap labour, to dig and pave a sunken garden, as well as build some pleasing walls. The vegetable garden was taken seriously as a source of supplies. We ate a lot of shot pigeons and ferreted rabbits (I have had no appetite for them since) to supplement the meat ration.

The village shop, McQuhae’s, an emporium identical to that in Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead, with blue blinds to signal its closure and old-fashioned scales on the wooden counter in its charmingly musty interior, provided groceries. For these, an account was submitted every year or two, of an accumulated immensity which horrified Mother. When she could bring herself to study its sheaves of itemised bills, there was always trouble about a range of goods which I had debited illicitly. Mr McQuhae also presided over the poky little neighbouring pub, the Bell, its taproom unaltered for a century or two, at the back door of which I made demands which became more pressing when, aged ten, I developed a taste for Babycham. I feared Mr McQuhae, an elderly Scots misanthrope, but he was happy to accept shillings from any of us.

It is extraordinary to remember how primitive were those little Berkshire villages, so close to London and yet utterly remote from it, even after the Second World War. Most of Aldworth’s inhabitants worked on the land. Few had ever visited the capital, or wished to. I once chatted to an old man who told me that he had only twice been to Reading, ten miles distant – once when he got married, and again to register his wife’s death. Almost everyone travelled by bicycle, and a few farms still used horses. Corn cut by the binder was threshed by a giant machine almost identical with those of Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ era. Partridges flourished in high stubble, cows had horns, meadows untainted with chemicals were rich in September mushrooms. Most of the farmers I knew seemed permanently cross, sometimes with me. A succession of increasingly weird vicars, one of whom liked to ring the church bells in the middle of the night, inhabited Aldworth’s spacious Georgian parsonage. An enchanting little steam train puffed
its way from Didcot to Newbury through the local villages – Compton, Hampstead Norris, Hermitage. I was occasionally put aboard at Compton for the journey to prep school. If Nanny, Clare and I wanted to visit the shops in Newbury, we caught the daily bus.

Some of my rural pleasures were entirely innocent: picking bluebells, picnics with Nanny, early essays in gardening and rearing ducks. Other diversions led to trouble, however. Oscar Wilde was quite mistaken in suggesting that it is difficult to misbehave in the country. For a child Rose Cottage and its environs, equipped with tools and weapons of all kinds, offered infinitely greater latitude for mischief than London. I achieved an early disgrace one Friday evening when we were disembarking from the family Austin on the steepish decline where we offloaded. As Nanny emerged, on a whim I released the handbrake. This set the car rolling briskly downhill, and caused Nanny to break her leg. Amazingly, she displayed not the slightest ill will about her subsequent fortnight in hospital. Possessed of infinite benevolence towards her charges, if not to the wider world, she rejected any notion of holding me blameworthy.

Not long afterwards I was racing down the same hill on my tricycle, with a small neighbour named John Ferrant standing on the back clinging to my shoulders. He slipped, fell off and broke a collarbone. As driver of the vehicle, I was deemed responsible for his mishap, somewhat unjustly as it seemed to me. Although I never extended my depredations outside the family, I regarded any piece of my parents’ property – cars, tools, clothes, technology, valuables – as legitimate booty, an attitude which persisted into my twenties. An eager entrepreneur, at the age of eight on a hot day I manufactured ice-lollies in the fridge, and walked to a motorcycle scramble on the Downs to sell my melting products for tuppence each.

I loved cooking with Nanny, and in rather the same mode I found explosives irresistible. Father had large reserves of both modern powder and shot for loading his own cartridges, and black powder for his nineteenth-century flintlock guns. These offered a child of an enquiring disposition plentiful scope for experiment, and I achieved some impressive bangs in neighbouring spinneys. Testing
the efficacy of a bow and arrow, and perhaps with some precocious Cupid image in mind, I loosed an idle shot at the chest of the little girl in next door’s garden – that once owned by Rosamond Lehmann – and scored a palpable hit. My great-grandfather, oddly enough, was whipped for doing something similar at Harper’s Ferry in 1861, as I discovered from family correspondence, but I was too slow-witted to plead ancestral example in my defence. In Aldworth, the girl’s mother made a fuss – what enlightened modern opinion would call a disproportionate response. The bow was confiscated.

It would be mistaken to suggest that others were always the victims of my activities. Most often, they impacted on myself. Dispatched one day to my bedroom for a rest after lunch, I decided to escape irksome captivity by emulating Hopalong Cassidy. I reasoned that if he could leap nimbly from a moving stagecoach, it would be simplicity itself for me to vault from a first-floor window. I suffered a badly sprained ankle. Out on my first bike with Nanny and Clare, I sought to terrorise them by careering full tilt towards the pushchair down a steep slope, with the anticlimactic consequence that I was thrown off, and fell sobbing at Nanny’s feet nursing multiple abrasions.

A year or so later, out from prep school, as we walked into the cottage Father drew my attention to a large collection of fireworks. These, he said, were assembled for a forthcoming Thursday Club party. On no account was I to touch them. I spent the next hour in my bedroom, dissecting the largest rocket. Curiosity then prompted me to apply a match to its heaped entrails. For some hours afterwards, fearful of recriminations, I concealed the frightful burns on my hand until, in the midst of tea, the pain became unbearable and I burst into tears. I returned to school in heavy bandages and disgrace, after a visit to the Streatley doctor. Any sense of guilt was moderated, however, by learning that a week later the Thursday Clubbers, liberally oiled, had burnt half the thatch off a nearby cottage roof while participating exuberantly in Father’s firework display. It could be argued – indeed often was, by my mother – that Father and his friends displayed a talent for idiocy to match my own, their excesses being rendered less excusable by age.

I knew that I was badly behaved and accident-prone, and the village agreed. Mrs Dobson, the housekeeper, an important cog in the domestic machine for sustaining Rose Cottage, mutinied and eventually jumped ship. She declared that she would take no further responsibility for the place if I was planted there without proper supervision, which did not mean that of Nanny. News of my unsuitability travelled. Invitations to local children’s houses, always sparse, were seldom extended more than once. The local grandee, Lord Iliffe, organised a boys’ cricket match at Yattendon, to which I was invited on the strength of his acquaintance with my parents. Hopelessly incompetent with bat or ball, and thus uninterested, I lay dozing prostrate in the outfield until noticed, bawled out, and sent home in disgrace.

Why do children misbehave? Some years later, when the scale of outrages with local friends escalated, an angry villager said to us one night: ‘If your parents weren’t who they are, they’d call you lot delinquents.’ It was as if I was determined to undo in a single childhood all the virtue so laboriously banked by Hastingses and Scott-Jameses over the previous century. Looking back, I still cannot explain myself. It was not that being naughty made me happy. On the contrary, social failure rendered me miserable for twenty years and more. I was anything but fearless, trembling before the prospect of my misdeeds’ discovery and the retribution that would follow. Never one of those cunning trouble-makers who escape punishment, I was always found out. With hindsight, most of my misdeeds were too trivial to confer heroic status, sufficing only to provoke dismay and anger amid those who had to live with me. Yet I felt no inclination to reform. If I could not be the best best, I would be the best worst. An obsessive curiosity about the consequences of courses of action impelled me to crime after crime.

I ‘borrowed’ binoculars, cameras, shooting sticks, and forgetfully abandoned them on the Downs. I tested firearms, roamed beyond any stipulated boundary, disobeyed the sternest and most sensible injunctions. We seldom entertained other children at the cottage, partly because few wanted to come, partly because Mother never encouraged them. For years I nursed a grievance that her punishment for my
little escapade in jumping out of the bedroom window was to cancel the planned visit of a small acquaintance, a rare and thus eagerly anticipated occurrence. Yet it would be unjust to blame my parents for my narrow social circle. I simply lacked the gift of making friends – as also, in considerable degree, did Mac and Anne themselves.

Both possessed a large acquaintance, but Father had no intimate friends and Mother few. Part of the trouble with their social life was that they were so ill-assorted a pair. The aesthetes and fashionistas most sympathetic to Anne could find little to say to Mac, the outdoorsman red in tooth and claw. This was almost literally the case, since he cherished a theory, imparted to him by some aged rustic, that the most humane means of dispatching a wounded pheasant was to crush the back of its skull between his teeth. Father was a better talker than listener. His shooting friends were amused by his extravagances, but frightened of my mother, who did not disguise her contempt for them.

Anne always professed to be a countrywoman, and indeed had a notable knowledge of wildflowers and a gift for gardening, which she later turned to good account in her writings. But she was swiftly bored by farmers moaning about the crops, or worse still by red-faced men who returned with Mac from a September partridge day, drank prodigious quantities of gin, and exchanged noisy recollections of the third drive. Anne liked to see animals grazing in the fields, but had no intimate interest in them beyond that afforded by their enhancement of the view. She actively disliked dogs. ‘The truth,’ she once acknowledged, ‘is that though I love the country, and am good with plants, I was brought up a London child.’ She enjoyed the ideal of rural life much more than its social manifestations, a confusion which has sometimes extended into my own experience.

They saw something of John and Penelope Betjeman, who then lived a few miles over the Downs at Farnborough. ‘Betch’ or ‘John B’, as he was always known, was already celebrated, and both Anne and Mac, as editors, had often commissioned his work. But Betjeman was not remotely the type to find Mac a soulmate, given his own abhorrence of shooting – remember his verse about the Porkers and
their pheasant massacres. Anne, who adored John B and later became a close friend, was nonetheless bewildered in those early days by the harshness, verging upon sadism, with which she watched him treat his son Paul. When the boy appeared in the drawing room one day, and they began to discuss his future, his father exclaimed gleefully: ‘I wonder if he’s going to be queer. Oh, I do hope so. Wouldn’t that be fun?’ Anne, like most of Betjeman’s acquaintance, was baffled by the manner in which he could display such kindness to a host of outsiders – including me, not many years later – while tormenting his own offspring.

They saw a lot of Nicholas Davenport, City journalist and a successful investor on his own account, though not, alas, on that of my parents. He lived with his painter wife Olga at Hinton, a pretty Georgian house near Oxford. One wintry day when I professed seven-year-old boredom, my parents took me with them to a Davenport drinks party. Failing to receive the attention which I thought appropriate, I drifted outside, packed a snowball, and precipitated it through the window into the crowded drawing room. Why, why? I still cannot say.

One day after a Davenport lunch, Mac and Anne gave their fellow guests, the Labour politician Douglas Jay and his wife Peggy, a lift to Oxford station. As they stood gossiping on the platform awaiting the London train, Douglas suddenly vanished. After some confusion, it was discovered that he had spotted a pretty girl on a train halted at the opposite platform, dashed over the bridge and was last seen disappearing towards Birmingham. This was not untypical, and surprised only Anne and Mac.