Did You Really Shoot the Television? (22 page)

All this was true, and reflected wisdom born of Mac’s mastery of the medium as it was at that time. As a reporter on
Tonight
he achieved his greatest popular success. He was a superb television presenter in the manner of those days, imbued with a passion for his subject – the English countryside – which he conveyed to his viewers. His scripts were famously word-perfect. Unfortunately, however, not only was he not making serious money from the BBC, nor was he from anywhere else. He had quit
Eagle
, which after its dazzling early success
was in terminal decline. The remains of
Country Fair
were sold off in 1957. He was still writing books – he produced several manuals on game shooting which sold well, but into a small market. He published a delightful rural anthology,
Macdonald Hastings’s Country Book
, but few anthologies make much money for their compilers.

He was often seized by extravagant financial hopes for unlikely projects. His 1960 novel
A Glimpse of Arcadia
was set in Victorian London. It tells the story of a river urchin who catches the last salmon to run up the Thames. It is a pleasant enough little yarn, with minor-key echoes of Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
. But Mac convinced himself that it had Dickensian merits and selling potential, and formed a company to shield the huge royalties he expected to earn from the book. In the event,
A Glimpse of Arcadia
never even ‘earned out’ the £200 advance he was paid for it. He sometimes embraced ideas for inventions which would make his fortune – I remember in particular a children’s board game named ‘Rat Race’, of which he had a prototype printed. But his commercial instincts were non-existent. On the rare occasions when he or Anne was solvent, and invested a little money in shares, they invariably plunged. Such people as the Hastingses do best to stick to what we understand – which means journalism. By the end of the 1950s, Mac’s earnings barely sufficed to pay his share of a town and country lifestyle, never mind fund the education of two children.

Without Anne’s income, the family would have been shipwrecked. After leaving the
Sunday Dispatch
in 1959, she accepted a glamorous-sounding title and large salary to become women’s editor of Beaverbrook Newspapers. This proved a false step. She hated the chronically rancorous atmosphere at the summit of the Express Group, and found male chauvinism institutionalised in Beaverbrook’s great black building at the bottom of Fleet Street. Her control of space and appointments was ill-defined, a fatal weakness for a newspaper executive. She found herself with no real power, and precious little influence.

One of her quirkier memories of that period was of commissioning an article from Margaret Thatcher, then the newly elected
MP for Finchley. Anne invited her to write about the experience of motherhood while serving in the Commons, and offered a fee of £100. Uniquely in Anne’s experience, Thatcher accepted the commission but rejected the terms as over-generous: ‘The fee is too high,’ said Thatcher, peremptory as always. ‘The current rate for a short article in a national newspaper is £50.’ Bemused, Anne took the deal, but was less confident she had got a bargain when she received Thatcher’s words, which were entirely banal. Anne took against The Lady after that experience, and maintained her scepticism throughout Thatcher’s premiership: ‘Except on matters of economics, Mrs Thatcher was never, to my mind, a woman of ideas.’

After two miserable years at the
Express
, Anne moved to become a columnist at the
Daily Mail
, an incomparably happier experience, not least because she shared an office with Bernard Levin, whom she admired prodigiously. Though I think Bernard returned the compliment, he professed to treat her as a near-imbecile, especially when she was struggling for inspiration: ‘Anne Scott-James, how you ever got into Fleet Street I cannot imagine. You never seem to have an idea in your head, but nonetheless, I do not like to see a woman in distress without lifting a finger to help her, and I would commend you to page five of today’s
Financial Times
, which you are too featherbrained to read, where there is a promising paragraph about the new industry of breeding miniature fish for fish fingers.’ Anne said ‘Thank you’ with unfeigned gratitude, and opened the
FT
.

The only episode which caused Bernard to display apparently genuine anger towards her took place when she found in her morning mail a charming drawing by Augustus John. It had been sent by John’s widow Dorelia after reading Anne’s published interview with Edward Heath, then the new Tory leader. Anne had mentioned in the piece how much she envied Heath the John drawings on the walls of his flat. Dorelia said she would much prefer that Anne acquired a further example of her husband’s work than that Heath did, and enclosed this handsome present. Bernard, mad with envy, said to their shared secretary: ‘Carole, I will dictate a letter to Mrs John on Anne’s behalf to save her the trouble. Are you ready? “Dear
Mrs John, It is extremely kind of you to send me the delightful drawing by your late husband – as you know, I am a great admirer of his work. Unfortunately, journalists on the
Daily Mail
are not allowed to accept perquisites, and I must regretfully send it back.”’ Even after Anne had countermanded Bernard’s instructions, rancour persisted for the rest of the day.

The first assignment she undertook for the
Mail
proved one of the most exciting and rewarding she ever fulfilled – a series of big descriptive pieces about the game parks of Kenya and Tanzania, then still British-ruled, and places of mystery and enchantment for British newspaper writers as well as readers. Anne produced fine work from the trip – big interviews with Joy Adamson, the lion queen, and David Sheldrick, famous for his intimacy with elephants.

Thereafter, she flourished as a weekly controversialist. Indeed, her
Mail
column represented probably the best journalistic work she ever did. Newspaper columns are designed to provoke reaction, to inspire popular echoes. Here is a typical sample of her efforts:

When parliament reassembles tomorrow I ask every man and woman in the House, from the Prime Minister to the youngest member, to emerge from their personal fog of lethargy, cynicism and laissez-faire and to attack politics this year with fire and spirit. The sickness of the British nation is not due to our war effort, loss of Empire or insuperable economic weakness.
Britain is dying of boredom
. The world is crackling with new ideas, some cheerful, some terrifying. But what do we hear from our leaders? Bromides, clichés, and announcements which fade into yawns on the languid parliamentary air…Spike your dim little speeches and give us a clarion call.

Likewise, on the limitations of British Railways:

Why did the heating fail on the 8.10 p.m. diesel train from Paddington to Wolverhampton on Tuesday, the coldest night of the winter, so that frozen passengers wrapped themselves in newspapers or stamped in
the corridors?
Nobody knows
. Why is the 7.56 a.m. train from Maidstone West to Charing Cross consistently late, but never rescheduled?
Nobody knows
. Why was a main-line train from Paddington to Swindon totally unheated last Friday?
Nobody knows
. Is there no way of putting some blood into our consumptive railways system? What’s needed now is something constructive.
What the railway bosses have got to do is to put some stuffing into the railway staff
. The telephone inquiry system should be ripped open from end to end. Ticket collectors should be more choosy about whom they eye as a criminal – one can’t help arriving without a ticket when one’s departure station has carried a placard saying ‘Please pay the other end’. The funny thing is, I love railways. When the train is punctual, the carriage warm, the refreshments good, a train journey is more relaxing and more beautiful than the same journey by car. I long to see the railways revitalised, for myself as well as for the country, and with strong leadership I believe it’s possible.

This was scarcely prose of Tolstoyan significance, and Anne herself would never have pretended that it was. Like all such journalism, it was designed to earn a cheer at the nation’s breakfast tables, then ignite next day’s bonfires. But indignation is more difficult to sustain than it sounds, popular themes harder to identify than they appear. Many journalists share a delusion that they are born to become columnists. A weekly fixed space in which to sound off about personal hobbyhorses seems to represent Shangri-La, the summit of a reporter’s ambitions. In truth, however gifted they may be, only a tiny minority of writers possess the special gifts to flourish as columnists.

In her pages, Anne campaigned vigorously for better design – especially of buildings, and for preserving the best old ones. If her judgements were sometimes wrong-headed (she described the disastrous new Cumbernauld estate outside Glasgow as ‘the most exciting place in the whole of Britain’, never having had the misfortune to live there), she was utterly right to denounce the cult of the high-rise. She castigated Oriana Fallaci’s cult 1961 book
The Useless Sex
,
which to her offered too bleak and one-dimensional a view of the predicament of women, and of the sterility of domestic life: ‘To me,’ wrote Anne, ‘a woman is happy who has found a man with whom she can fully communicate. A woman is happy if she is deeply interested in anything, whether it is people, work, art or just running a home.’ Fallaci, she argued, mistakenly translated discontent with her own personal predicament into a universal female predicament.

She denounced boarding schools, and said she thought eight too young to send children away from home. How I wished she had reached the same conclusion back in 1953! I sometimes wonder what
Mail
readers, even in 1961, made of a characteristic Scott-James touch, in a piece offering advice about entertaining. She described the botheration of being obliged to use a stand-in cook when Martha, her usual wizard, was in hospital. The newcomer demanded more help, ‘so I borrowed a parlour maid from my only rich friend’, who brought a butler too. She added: ‘Never ask an MP to dinner – he will be kept late at the House and ruin your timetable…Never get helpers you haven’t tried out before.’ Though Anne supposed herself down-to-earth, she could act pretty grand, in print as in life.

In her old age, she often asserted that there are nowadays far too many newspaper columns, retracing the same ground on the same day in the same title. As a former editor, I agree wholeheartedly. Every national title today boasts twice as many columnists as their talents deserve space. She also thought that, individually, my generation of journalists write too much. No professional controversialist, she argued, can produce first-class work more than once a week. Indeed, when there came a time that I myself sometimes contributed to two or three national titles on different subjects, she chastised me for excessive output: ‘Beaverbrook would never allow his people to write for more than one paper,’ she said, ‘and he was right.’

I pointed out that few proprietors are nowadays prepared to pay any journalist, however successful, sufficient money to monopolise his or her services. She stuck to her guns, writing in her autobiography: ‘Today it is not uncommon for a writer to publish almost identical columns in a Sunday paper, a daily, and a weekly
magazine. This helps to pay the school fees, at the price of yawns from the reader.’ Yet I sometimes heard her old colleagues express scepticism about her own working practices, arguing that she made a mighty prima-donna fuss about producing a single piece a week. She was sufficiently valued to earn a good salary – the
Mail
was paying her £8,000 a year in 1963 – for a small output. Most of us have to write much more to match her income in today’s money.

She was right, however, in asserting that for a columnist the generation of ideas is a far more challenging task than their expression on paper. Bernard Levin was prodigious in this respect. He was also a master of that indispensable journalistic art, getting one’s first and last sentences right. Anne once heard him say, ‘I like to start with a paradox and end with a platitude.’ She also acknowledged the importance of being in touch. No columnist can produce top-class work without meeting people. A star performer, she said, ‘will know Wigan as well as Westminster…The writing must be sincere and go straight to the point.’ Many practitioners fall into the beartrap of verbosity. Levin, again, did some of his best work in a column for the
Mail
which was no more than nine hundred words long, the same length as most of Anne’s pieces. Today, many columnists occupy space of twelve or even fifteen hundred words. This is almost invariably too much. Some of Levin’s later work for
The Times
suffered grievously from overwriting, especially when he bored for Britain about Wagner.

If the careers of both Mac and Anne appeared to be flying high, their domestic life became increasingly wretched. They lived almost entirely separate existences. Once, we all went on holiday together with the Wysards in the South of France – Tony Wysard was Clare’s godfather. I revelled in the luxuries of the Blue Train, but otherwise the trip was not a success. Whatever the wilful delusions of parents, few small children enjoy Nice as much as Newquay. English sand is miles better than foreign muck, as I told the parents frankly after our trip to Cavalière. Thereafter a new summer routine was adopted. Our parents went their own separate ways, while Nanny was dispatched with Clare
and me to Frinton, Broadstairs, or – in red-letter years – to a Butlin’s holiday camp.

To this day, friends dissolve into hoots of laughter at this notion. Butlin’s is perceived as the acme of vulgarity. I leap passionately to its defence. Camp life perfectly suited the young Hastingses, along with millions of their generation. Clacton, Filey, Margate – we tried all of them, and were entranced. The food was great, the pools and boating lakes and mini-railways free and impeccably supervised. I roamed at will, in perfect safety, while Nanny escorted Clare. The chalets were comfortable enough. I made more little summer friends at Butlin’s than ever I did on the Côte d’Azur. Holiday camps were a great national institution, rubbished only by snobs who never experienced them. At twelve, my highest ambition was to become a Butlin’s redcoat. Those trips represented almost the only periods of my childhood during which I never got into trouble. The sole hitch occurred when I returned to prep school after one such idyll. It was discovered that I had acquired head lice, and infected a hundred or so other boys. As we were combed and disinfected, Mother received a stiff letter from the headmaster, suggesting that in future I might be dispatched to holiday in more salubrious locations.