Did You Really Shoot the Television? (21 page)

When he emerged from the skerm carrying the quiver, a chill fell on the gathering. Xa-ou crouched with his head sunk on his shoulders. Another hunter, whose name sounded like ‘No’, slipped round behind the human predator. As Father fingered the arrows, he did not know that their poison, which can kill a giraffe, was smeared on the boneshaft, not the barb. It was made from a beetle’s larvae, stiffened with gum from the t’lopi tree. In his ignorance, Mac was living very dangerously. When he handed the quiver back to Xa-ou, the tension relaxed sharply. Xa-ou accepted another cigarette, and No produced his bow for examination.

Mac looked curiously at it, reflecting that a schoolboy could have made a much more efficient instrument – yet could not have used it half so well. No mimed the firing of an arrow, holding the bow against his chest at an angle. None of the white visitors had ever seen a weapon so oddly aimed and used, yet No then demonstrated that he could place an arrow accurately at a range of thirty yards, whether standing, kneeling or lying prone. Even after achieving a hit on a quarry, a
bushman hunter was obliged to follow the spoor for hours, sometimes days, before the poisoned shaft did its work. When he reached the carcass, it was too heavy to carry, so it was necessary to travel for many hours more to fetch his family, a race with the vultures. Sometimes others of the clan could be summoned to the kill by smoke signals. Yet bushmen often went hungry, and at the end of the dry season when Father met them, Xa-ou’s family was very hungry indeed. They seemed to lack even the roots and berries which supplemented game in their diet. Mac gave them all the spare rations in the truck.

At that time it was estimated that ten thousand bushmen remained in Bechuanaland, Angola and South-West Africa – modern Namibia. Most of these had already succumbed to the white man’s dominance, becoming more or less literally scavengers beneath his tables. Only a very few thousand of the Makokas lived as Xa-ou’s family did, in the manner that had remained almost unchanged for half a million years. Mac, Chris Ware and John Currye were the most privileged of tourists. They encountered one of the last communities in a society which has now vanished for ever.

Chris photographed every aspect of the family’s doings until he sagged with exhaustion. They were fascinated to see one man start a fire by rubbing two sticks, in a fashion which they had supposed mere Boy Scout legend. Within one of the women’s dilly bags, Mac came upon a small tortoise-shell. Inside this, in turn, lay lamb’s wool and a green aromatic powder. He realised that he had found her beauty box. In their hair, on their legs, around their necks, all the women wore exquisite beans worked from shell.

They stored their water in hollowed ostrich-egg shells. With the aid of Ba’phuti as interpreter, Xa-ou’s people told Mac about ‘eat-all-day’ beans, of which a handful could sustain a man – or at least a bushman – from sunrise to sunset. They described the
tsamma
, seeds of a watermelon which Europeans disdain but the bushmen prize, roasting them then grinding them between flat stones into meal.

When Mac asked No how they lived when game ran out, the little hunter led him a few yards into the bush, and pointed out a plant like a tiny green vine. He dug furiously with a sharpened stick, and
at last pulled up a tuber the size of a turnip. Scraping off the skin, he offered it to his visitor: ‘It was rather like eating something between celery and parsnip, full of cool, refreshing juices; enough to save a man’s life who was in dire need of water.’ The family rejected Chris Ware’s urgings to dance. Midgeley, the District Commissioner, later explained that they danced only at full moon, when they often played pantomime games all night, acting out a lion hunt, or a hawk swooping on its prey, or dogs running down a gemsbok.

Hour after hour, white visitors and bushmen talked. ‘We kept at it,’ said Mac, ‘because it was no use going away and expecting to find them in the same place tomorrow.’ Indeed, next day Mac learned from Ba’phuti that Xa-ou’s family had already moved on, perhaps alarmed by their visit. He reflected on one point which seemed to him significant. During their encounter, all the curiosity was displayed by the white men. Maybe, Mac thought, this was why bushmen had advanced so little for so long. ‘Curiosity is the human quality which moves the rest of us to experiment, to improvise, to explore, to invent and to develop. I fancy that the Makokas gazed without surprise at our cameras, our watches, our rifles, our clothes, all the ingenious impedimenta of civilised man, because they were mentally incapable of being interested. Like the animals about them, their ruling quality is only the negative emotion of fear.’

When the time came to go, with grave courtesy the bushmen accepted presents of tobacco. The two groups waved, one from the truck, the other from the fireside, until they were out of sight of each other. Father, Chris and John felt a sense of awe about what they had seen, which remained with them for the rest of their lives. Next day, as they headed north-east once more, they were told of another bushmen’s camp nearby, and drove to it. There, however, instead of authentic hunter-gatherers, they found a sad cluster of half-tame pygmies, already collecting kitchen utensils and using matches in place of tinder, as well as being obviously diseased. The family had chickens and goats. These were not bushmen such as Mac had travelled so far to see, but a sub-group on a tragic, squalid path towards ‘civilisation’.

On their return to Ghanzi, DC Midgeley cut short their excited account of what was to them a remarkable encounter. He urged his
visitors that they had better get a move on if they wanted to get out of Bechuanaland before the rains. John Currye said: ‘I’ve seen enough sand.’ The battered old Chevy started to wend its way north once more across the Kalahari, on a course towards Victoria Falls. They had barely started before the first storms came: ‘The black velvet of the African night split open like an over-ripe fruit,’ wrote Mac. ‘A jagged red fork of lightning ripped through the skin of the sky. Thunder sounded like the crash of war drums. With a whoosh, the clouds bucketed a cataract.’ The truck was soon ploughing through heavy mud, struggling to make ten miles an hour. They drove all night now, John Currye fearful that the Chevy was on its last legs. Chris Ware gave a sudden exclamation, causing Father to wake from a doze in time to glimpse a big leopard in the headlights. He groped for his rifle, eager for a trophy, but the beast was gone.

They risked a bathe in the river at Toteng to wash away some of the filth in which they were coated. This provoked the DC’s subsequent wrath. He told them that by rights, the local crocodiles should have had them. They fractured another spring on the truck just as they approached Maun. But by now Mac, triumphant, did not care. That night Chris Ware pumped a forge’s bellows while John used a heavy hammer to temper a new leafspring to replace the broken part. Chris paused for a moment, walked round the truck in the darkness – and fell headlong into the concrete inspection pit. The expedition’s luck, which had favoured it brilliantly for so long, had at last broken. Chris smashed five ribs. He was obliged to remain in hospital until an aircraft could be found to fly him to Livingstone.

Now there were just Mac and John Currye, pushing onward in the truck. Instead of desert, they found themselves in green and marshy game country, amid hippo and elephants, cranes and herons, paradise flycatchers, kingfishers, squawking louries. Again and again the Chevrolet had to detour off the track to avoid tree trunks thrown down by elephants. Amid the rain, the flies became almost unbearable. When Mac walked into the bush to shoot a buck, their boy Malenga followed him, pumping a cloud of DDT around his head. There was water everywhere, and many moments at which they feared the truck irretrievably
bogged. They stopped to watch the passage of a great herd of wildebeest, hastening south. Mac shot one for the pot. Suddenly, right by the trackside, they glimpsed a huge, black-maned lion, no more than five yards away. It turned and trotted off into the bush.

Mac decided that the moment had come to enjoy himself, and to fulfil a lifelong ambition. Ignoring a display of eye-rolling alarm from Malenga, he and John set off in pursuit. They had stalked some way, Mac increasingly confident that they must come upon the great animal, when John touched him on the shoulder and breathed: ‘Behind you. The lioness is behind you.’ Mac turned, glimpsed a crouching form fifty yards distant, and fired. His quarry fell. ‘You’ve got her!’ cried John exultantly. It seemed one of the great moments of Mac’s life, when at last he joined the brotherhood of Uncle Lewis and all those generations of African hunters he admired and envied so much. ‘Now let’s go after the old man,’ said Currye. They hastened onwards – and found nothing. The shot must have hastened the lion’s flight into the bush. They returned to the carcass – and instead of a dead lioness found a huge hyena. It was a crushing disappointment, the nearest Mac would ever come to acquiring the rug of his dreams.

That night they camped beside the Chobe river, within easy reach of Vic Falls. Mac shot a brace of duck for dinner, and while the boys cooked them the two white men stripped and scrubbed in the river, then sat listening to the hippos ‘clearing their throats like elderly colonels’. Night fell, and the mosquitoes descended. When the travellers finally slipped into fitful sleep, they were wakened by more torrential rain. They sat, sodden, drinking coffee brewed on the Primus, waiting for dawn. At first light Mac potted crocodiles, dreaming of handbags. Every beast he hit disappeared into the river, however, its tail thrashing. They pushed on to Victoria Falls. That evening they had to waken a slumbering policeman to open the barrier that marked Bechuanaland’s border with Rhodesia. As the truck touched a metalled road for the first time in weeks, they felt as if they had begun to drive on a carpet. At Vic Falls Hotel, Mac threw himself on a bed and fell asleep without taking off his clothes.

Next day, a little plane from Maun brought in Chris Ware, scarcely
able to walk. They divided the remaining stores between their two boys. John Currye agreed to drive the truck back to Bulawayo, and kept the Primus stove as a souvenir. Mac and Chris caught the BOAC plane home, their only souvenir a baby crocodile which the intrepid explorers presented to the London Zoo. It was christened Marcus, in honour of
Eagle
’s editor, and survived for years.

When Mac’s children’s book about the experience appeared, entitled
The Search for the Little Yellow Men
, it was inevitably dedicated to Uncle Lewis, who sent a characteristic letter:

I was struck by the contrast between your story and the series of ‘adventures’ in the Kalahari recently given on TV by [Laurens] Van Der Post: the same scene, and achievements no more than yours, but blown up by VdP into a saga of original and death-defying exploration of the unknown. And stuffed with tear-jerking sentiment about the savage way we – the British and Dutch and the Bantu – have deprived the Bushman of his heritage in the African continent. What falldoodle it was!!

Mac was pleased when a
Sunday Times
reviewer, quite unknown to him, made the same comparison: ‘What is so remarkable is that (unlike Mr Van der Post who last year took a carefully-equipped expedition into the same hazardous country) Mr Hastings had never been in Africa before.’ The difference, of course, was that Mac was a shameless journalist-adventurer, while Van der Post possessed a lifelong gift for mystic waffle which sustained a reputation until after his death, when some of his deceits and exaggerations were exposed.

Mac’s experience in the Kalahari was among the happiest of his life, fulfilment of a family dream. His narrative gained him less celebrity than he deserved, for it described one of his finest hours as a journalist-adventurer. I have cherished ever since a photograph of him dirty and grim-faced, standing amid the great wilderness in his bush jacket, rifle shouldered. There was Father in the heroic guise in which I loved to see him – and in which, of course, he best liked to perceive himself.

Towards the end of 1956 a BBC television producer whom Mac had never heard of, Donald Baverstock, rang and said he wanted to meet. Donald, a volatile and impassioned little Welshman in his early thirties, had energy, originality and talent, as well as the financial good fortune to be married to Enid Blyton’s daughter. He liked to act the part of a Chicago gang boss, striding into the BBC Club, an entourage of loyal acolytes trailing in his wake, with the strutting aggression of a man who expects a shoot-out, and welcomes the prospect. A staccato talker, Baverstock hired and fired in lunges, launching dramatic creative thrusts of which the most spectacular was now imminent. At his first meeting with Mac, in a smoke-filled pub in Notting Hill, the BBC man disclosed that he had been commissioned to start a new weekday magazine programme, which would be broadcast at early evening for the next few weeks. Would Mac be interested in contributing some short film items about the countryside? Donald was explicitly recruiting among old
Picture Post
hands – the magazine had just folded. He believed that they had the gift for smart, snappy, witty, irreverent photo-journalism, even if they had never worked in television.

The embryo programme was, of course, the legendary
Tonight
, which first burst upon the airwaves in February 1957. Its begetter, BBC’s Head of Talks Grace Wyndham-Goldie, said that her vision was of a programme ‘which looked at those in power from the perspective of the powerless’. Transmitted five evenings a week, in the years that followed
Tonight
acquired an audience of eight million, and became one of the sensations of that first British TV generation. Presented by Cliff Michelmore, a veteran of the radio music
programme
Two Way Family Favourites
, it featured as reporters Fyfe Robertson, Alan Whicker, Derek Hart, Trevor Philpott, Slim Hewitt – and Macdonald Hastings. It had a resident topical calypso performer, Cy Grant, later replaced by Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor. Many of the young turks among its directors and producers rose to the top of the BBC – Donald’s deputy, Alasdair Milne, would become director-general. Donald himself had a journalistic genius which flourished dazzlingly on
Tonight
. One night Mac took me, a boy of eleven, to the temporary studio off Kensington High Street from which the first programmes were transmitted – nobody then imagined that the show would become a fixture. Amid the cameras, cabling and dazzling lights, the tension in the gallery and relentless sense of crisis, I watched enthralled as
Tonight
was transmitted. I shook the hand of Cy Grant – the first black man I had ever met – secured the autographs of Baverstock, Milne and the rest, and went home starstruck.

Like every successful news impresario, Donald made up the story as he went along, flying each programme by the seat of his pants. A later
Daily Mail
boss, David English, once observed to me that all great editors are obsessives. So it was with Baverstock. He intervened in everything, tore up running orders without warning, threw tantrums and sometimes drunken scenes worthy of a Hollywood diva, and produced a programme which delighted and enthralled the nation. It was sharp, newsy, brave, whimsical, funny. From the outset, Mac Hastings’s weekly turn was perceived as comedy by most of the Baverstock mafia, pavement types to a man. Mac, however, treated his mission with the earnestness of a true believer. He sought to educate a vast urban and suburban audience – for
Tonight
soon dominated the nation’s airwaves in a fashion unthinkable in today’s multi-channel world – about rural Britain.

He revisited much of the repertoire which he had performed for
Picture Post
back in 1938. He made little films, initially between four and six minutes long, later more protracted, about pheasant-shooting, salmon-fishing, cattle-farming, sheepdogs, remote Wiltshire villages and Scottish trawlermen. Today, when television has been everywhere and filmed
everything, it is hard to believe that in the late 1950s Mac was a pioneer, but so he was. Indeed, all the
Tonight
reporters were. They did things which are now wearily familiar, but were then excitingly new.

Mac shot a piece with the Household Cavalry in which he traversed the jumps in their Knightsbridge riding school, describing through a primitive radio microphone the sensations as he rode. He created a ‘dream’ film about making over the garden at Rose Cottage, which for some years had been sorely neglected. Standing amidst its weedy borders in old trousers, he fantasised before the camera about transforming his plot. He persuaded every manufacturer of garden machinery in the country to dispatch tools and men to west Berkshire. The boxy old Newman camera filmed a great advancing column of cultivators, hedge-trimmers, flame-throwers, mowers, watched by Father in ‘dream’ white jacket and flannels as they introduced perfect order to the little garden. Then Mac did his ‘pay-off’, back in the wilderness in old trousers, looking around with a shrug and saying, ‘What a pity it was all a dream.’ In those innocent days, when millions of people swallowed at face value
Panorama
’s 1 April film of Italy’s spaghetti harvest, few viewers worked out that Mac filmed his closing shot alongside his ‘intro’, before the machines moved in. Instead, they perceived him as making magic.

He had been a well-known journalist for almost two decades, but
Tonight
made Mac, like all its regular contributors, a star for a season. He achieved a street recognition which of course he adored, as did I. In school holidays he often took me on location. There was a memorable occasion, during the great frozen winter of 1962, when I flew with him by chartered helicopter to a snowbound farm in the West Country, to describe a weather siege which persisted for more than two months. I loved the chopper trip, of course, but was already so absurdly tall that both Father and I found it an ordeal to share the farmer’s bed, while the camera crew dossed down on sofas.

Once, filming at the village of Castle Combe in Wiltshire, he sent me to buy cigarettes for him. Walking back through the little crowd which always gathered where a TV camera appeared, I heard one woman say to another, ‘Ooh, there’s that Macdonald Hastings.’ At that
moment, I reflected very consciously that when I grew up I wanted people to say, ‘Ooh, there’s that Max Hastings,’ though at fourteen I had not the slightest conception of how such a miracle might be achieved. During the garden filming I staged a shameful display of pique because my sister Clare featured in the film, and I did not.

On other occasions I witnessed some of Mac’s embarrassments – or rather, what might have been embarrassments, if he had possessed any grain of self-awareness. Part of his success as a TV presenter stemmed from an absolute lack of it. Like all genuine eccentrics, he was oblivious of the impact his actions had on others. Nonsenses on film which reduced the Baverstock gang to hysterical laughter in the viewing theatre at Lime Grove – whence the programme moved once its longevity became assured – left Mac serenely unmoved. There was the occasion when he filmed Kenzie, a rascally old Lincolnshire poacher whom Mac helped to make a celebrity, supposedly calling geese. We lay for hours in a freezing ditch with the camera crew, Kenzie calling for all he was worth, while the geese resolutely declined to respond. The film was transmitted anyway, Mac alone failing to perceive its comic quality.

Gin made him accident-prone. One day in a pub whose landlord was initially thrilled to have on his premises Macdonald Hastings, TV celeb (though the ghastly word had not been invented in those days), he stood on a chair to examine a glass case containing a magnificent painted plaster fish in a case. In a scene recalling
Three Men in a Boat
, he toppled the case and was left standing in the ruins, clutching fragments of the fish. The landlord’s enthusiasm for celebrity customers vanished like winter sunshine.

On another occasion, Father decided to make a film about a cottage in Sussex where a headsman – supposedly the executioner of Charles I – had lived. As a gesture of bravado, in the seventeenth century this character had carved a headsman’s axe into the lintel inside his front door. Mac knew the story, because the estate on which the cottage stood had once belonged to his pre-war friends the Pallants. They had long ago sold up, but Mac rang the new owners. He arranged to undertake a reconnaissance for the film, and was invited to lunch, collecting me from school at Charterhouse along
the way. Roast lamb and apple crumble with this unknown and uninteresting but obviously prosperous banker and his wife went well enough, and afterwards we all trooped down to the cottage, now occupied by a farmworker. The cowman himself was absent at work, and his wife, deferential and nervous, admitted us with much apron-wiping. Horror of horrors, the interior of the cottage had been replastered. The axe was no longer visible. Mac called for a sharp knife, and tentatively picked at the plaster. A chunk or two fell away, revealing timber, but no axe.

He chipped away a trifle further, watched with increasing anxiety by the cowman’s wife, and with some dismay by her landlord. Father decided that more professional measures were called for. Praying in aid the estate office, a plasterer – or rather, unplasterer – was summoned from Haslemere. By 5 p.m., most of the wall around the front door lay on the floor. At that point the cowman walked in. After a brief survey of the situation, he launched into a peroration which began, ‘I may not know much about my rights, but I do know that…’ At 5.15 an elderly neighbour stopped by, and announced jovially, ‘I hear you’se looking for that old axe thing. Why, it were taken away to the museum these twenty year back.’ At 5.30 we drove away, Mac the only member of the party oblivious of the trail of outrage in his wake. When I suggested that our hosts felt injured, he waved a dismissive hand and said, ‘It’s nothing, boy. I shall send them flowers.’ Flowers? Lifetime invitations to the Chelsea Gala would not have restored harmony to that devastated corner of west Sussex.

Even in my teens I perceived the perils of Mac’s cavalier attitude to money. The fee for his early five-minute films for
Tonight
, each of which required three or four days to recce, shoot, edit and dub commentary for, was thirty-five guineas. As late as 1962, the BBC was paying him only £3,500 a year for his half-time services, less than he had earned from
Eagle
a decade earlier. In those days presenters were modestly rewarded by the parsimonious Beeb. On location with a four- or five-man crew, Mac bought round upon round of drinks not only for the BBC team, but for half the occupants of whatever hotel bar they found themselves in. I discovered that he seldom, if ever,
troubled to submit expense claims for entertaining. A gentleman journalist, he thought, should rise above scrabbling for petty cash. Thus, even when in the eyes of the world he achieved some fame, he made little out of it. The lesson stayed with me all my life. Not a farthing spent on my own assignments has ever gone unclaimed for.

As
Tonight
’s fortunes boomed, Mac’s horizons widened. He undertook film tours for the programme in Kenya and India. He was commissioned to make several series of fifty-minute documentaries about the countryside, which proved hugely popular – notably
River-beat
and
In Deepest England
. He was always impeccably tailored on camera, and viewers became fascinated by his endless changes of clothes. Eventually
Tonight
ran an item about his wardrobe, arraying racks of suits and shoes across the studio floor. His speaking voice was a model of what was then admired as ‘BBC English’. When the time came that I made my own first film for television, in Vietnam in 1970, when I was twenty-four, Father wrote me a long letter about the shortcomings of my performance. I resented this not at all, because I knew that his strictures were just, and prompted by love. His remarks are worth quoting not in the context of my own career, but because they reflected his shrewd understanding of what broadcasting is – or at least then was – all about:

Better to put my comments on your programme in
24 Hours
last night in writing because you can consider it again, and the impression on your memory is likely to be stronger. You made two major mistakes which I beg you never to make again. You RANTED, especially in your wildtrack. The law is that, in television, you are not addressing a mass audience. You are talking to a small family group relaxing in their sitting rooms at an hour when they are thinking of bed. They are simple people whose interest must be won, to concern them with an exotic ‘spot’ on a subject they can’t even place on the map. Between you and me, you talked last night like an anonymous newscaster. What you said was sense. But you will never be a TV personality until you inject warmth into your voice, a more confidential ‘avuncular’ manner.

The lens of the camera isn’t ten million people; it’s Mrs Jones thinking about groceries, doing her knitting and waiting to be interested. TV is the most confidential of all mediums of communication. Even more confidential than a feature film, when actors accustomed to the stage offer a grimace or a gesture which might be necessary to reach the gallery at Drury Lane, but which is quite unnecessary on a big screen where the flicker of an eyebrow is enough. On the little screen, the relationship with the audience is even more intimate than that…God knows, it’s a difficult act, especially in the sort of conditions in which you have been working lately. But you mustn’t think of yourself, you must think of ‘them’ sitting around the box in their homes. You must give an appearance, whatever the strain under which you are working, of complete, flattering and good-humoured relaxation.

You must think, not so much of hot news, but of the things that
they
might want to know. Play it cool, and as intimately as you know how. An appearance of wisdom is born of a soft, unexcited voice. Your second mistake was to talk to camera with sunglasses on. It is as bad manners to talk to Mrs Jones from behind sunglasses as it would be to enter her house smoking a cigarette. If you must wear them, what you should have done was to take them off as you addressed the camera. The gesture would have been valuable to enable you to get the juice up for the piece to camera, and as a courtesy, like raising a hat. You would have got the message across that you were talking under a blazing sun, without presenting yourself with dead man’s eyes.