Did You Really Shoot the Television? (25 page)

I was a bemused spectator of the terse exchange of incivilities when Mac and Anne’s paths crossed in the hall as he returned from Ressource, and she left for a long-planned holiday in the South of France. It required the passage of a decade or two before I acknowledged that Anne’s behaviour deserved sympathy. Mac retired to a hotel, where he could receive the nursing which he needed. Granny wrote in her diary: ‘2 October: news of Mac at last. Seems to have been an awful ordeal. Will that boy never learn? 7 October: Beryl rang Anne to get news of Mac as I was so worried and he answered the phone, and had been home (we think) nearly a week. Very hurt he did not get someone to write or phone me. 5 November: Mac came to dinner and told us all about his travels. He seems to have been in a coma when they found him and it was obviously a very near thing. He is still very ill.’

Mac duly received his £5,000 cheque from
The People
, but the articles he wrote did nothing like justice to his experience. The paper was an unrewarding platform for thoughtful writing. Mac felt
inhibited from telling anything like the truth about why he had sought the assignment, or how he felt while he fulfilled it. He was no more self-revealing in the book he later wrote,
After You, Robinson Crusoe
, which proved a surprising commercial failure, given the sensational battiness of the story. Worse, it was months before he was fit to work again. He threw away the only positive effects of the island sojourn by reverting immediately to a diet of cigarettes and gin.

At vast expense, including six months in quarantine kennels, Mac brought home his beloved Friday, a dog which proved to possess great strength of body and character, of the wrong kind. Friday adored humans, but hated animals. Other dogs, not to mention sheep, were as dust beneath his chariot wheels. Mac sought to turn Friday’s murderous career to advantage, by making a little film for
Tonight
in which he showed a cure being wrought by the old shepherd’s remedy of tying the dog to a ram for ten minutes. On camera, Friday indeed looked suitably chastened by the experience, as should Mac have been by the flood of viewers’ letters denouncing his cruelty. But within days the incorrigible canine offender returned to his bloody ways. After eighteen months of carnage and compensation payments, a tearful Mac recognised the inevitable and had Friday put down.

Sceptics might suppose that Mac exaggerated his tale of terror at sea, during the storm which his schooner experienced on the way to Ressource. A few months after returning home, however, he learned that the vessel which recovered him from the island had foundered with all hands in a similar blow.

It is curious to look back and reflect that, at the age of fifteen, I perceived Mac’s desert island adventure merely as one more chapter in the picaresque saga of his life, one more giant obstacle on the assault course which I myself must some day undertake in order to live up to his awesome achievements. It was years before I recognised that the ideal journalistic stunt should involve the appearance of hardship and danger, but a minimum of their realities. His experience represented the antithesis of
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!
. He exchanged appalling suffering for relatively modest
reward. His health never entirely recovered. ‘I’m sorry I did not do better,’ he wrote ruefully. His experiment did not disprove the notion that a castaway could survive on an atoll in the Indian Ocean. It merely showed that one as ill-prepared and impractical as himself was unlikely to prosper.

Forty-five years later, a senior executive of the
Daily Mail
telephoned me bright and early one summer morning to announce in tones of high excitement: ‘We’ve just had a marvellous idea! You must go and relive your father’s desert island adventure.’

‘Not a chance,’ I said.

‘We’d pay you lots of money.’

‘There is not enough in Lord Rothermere’s piggy bank to induce me to do anything of the sort. I’m fifty-nine years old, for God’s sake! Father was fifty, and that was twenty years too old.’

My crestfallen caller put down the phone, no doubt to transmit word to higher authority that they were no longer making Hastingses like they used to do. I mopped my brow, reflecting gratefully upon the lessons in life which I had learned since 1960. I revered Father’s memory not a whit less in 2005 than I had cherished his prowess in my teens. But I recognised that a jury composed of his mother, sister, wife and colleagues could not all be wrong. Diminished responsibility represented the most charitable verdict.

In the last years during which my parents professed to occupy the same home, Mummy and I often shared a giggle over her breakfast tray about Daddy’s excesses, of which drinking was the most conspicuous. Mac was never a violent drunk, but he became an increasingly morose and habitual one. Sober, he could still be an enchanting companion. At work, he usually controlled himself sufficiently to do the business. But at home, his passages of conviviality and indeed dignity narrowed. Nanny’s lips pursed deeply as she was obliged to see ‘Mr Hastings tiddly’ with ever greater regularity. My mother withdrew into a cloud of contempt. A few months after his return from the Seychelles, Anne gave Mac his marching orders. Prominent among the reasons why I threw in my lot with Father was the anguished memory of past mocking of his misery, verbal betrayals which I felt that my mother had incited me to share in. It all seemed her fault. For years afterwards, even when he was remarried, Father would assert defensively: ‘The divorce represented your mother’s wish, not mine.’ Anne’s decision to evict him was founded upon a simple belief that enough was enough. In a final chivalrous gesture, he provided the then customary but unfailingly sordid contemporary grounds for divorce, by passing a night in a Brighton hotel with a professional co-respondent.

Like all children in such circumstances, I was stunned by my parents’ parting. Despite the long disharmony, and their final period of open alienation, divorce seemed very dreadful. I felt a chill and shame, reading in newspapers at school the brief paragraphs announcing the rift in the Hastings household. I saw little of Mother
during the time that followed. Indeed, over the next thirty years there were long periods when we scarcely spoke.

Frustrated and miserable at home, I enlisted Father’s help to get me a holiday job. His name was still affectionately remembered at Lyons, and as soon as I was fifteen and legally able to work, I was admitted to the company’s Olympia sales team, hawking choc ices and lollies at Bertram Mills’s circus and assorted exhibitions such as the Ideal Home. I threw myself into the role, sometimes earning as much as six pounds a week in commission. I was good at selling ice cream, and passed several successive holidays peddling trayloads of frosty delicacies in the aisles at Olympia amid clowns and elephants or show houses. Those were the happiest interludes in an unhappy time.

My last years at school were landmarked by earnest conferences between Father and my teachers. Charterhouse took the view that it would be wisest for me to leave immediately after taking A-levels. If I stayed on, it seemed likely that I would commit some excess which made it necessary to sack me. I was thought a disruptive and even dangerous influence, unfit for any position of responsibility. When my contemporaries became monitors, I was passed over. There was an episode in which I discovered a mortar bomb on Hankley Common while training with the cadet corps. I brought this souvenir back to my house, and was interrupted by a monitor while dismantling it. He confiscated the bomb, and continued my technical studies on his own account. The resultant explosion caused him to spend a disagreeable few nights in Guildford General Hospital. Since he was thus unavailable to be chastised, I was invited to stand in, and received the usual six from my housemaster. I left Charterhouse amid expressions of relief on both sides. I would have been a misfit in any school, but was especially so at that one. It was a sordid place, dominated by seedy men with anachronistic values. I have always applauded the sentiments of the Emperor Septimus Severus, who had a man scourged for drawing attention to the fact that they had been at school together.

When there was no work for me with Lyons, I spent holidays in Father’s rented cottage near Winchester. There I watched with dismay
and pity as he struggled to make some sort of new life for himself, and to sustain his career, while growing ever more dependent upon gin. One legacy of that period is that I have never since been able to see a Gordon’s bottle, far less to sample one, without a shudder of revulsion. Even Mac’s old Thursday Club friends were appalled by his consumption. One day we lunched with the actor James Robertson Justice, then famous for his portrayal of Sir Lancelot Spratt in the ‘Doctor’ films, at his Hampshire millhouse. James turned to me afterwards and enquired, in his inimitably fruity tones: ‘Can you drive?’ No, I could not. James, himself scarcely teetotal, was moved to observe that we had better hope God was our co-pilot on the journey home, because our safe arrival with Father at the wheel would require divine intercession. Somehow we made it, and many other such trips. But we did not deserve to.

More than thirty years passed, and I suffered a broken marriage of my own, before I learned to adopt a more temperate view of my parents’ relationship. The attribution of blame was as absurd as it is in most such cases. Mac and Anne were simply two people who lacked anything in common beyond the shared parentage of children. At the time, however, my commitment to Mac’s cause was strengthened by the fact that he seemed helpless on his own. I learned a lot about cooking during the year or two in which we were much together, because he was scarcely capable of boiling an egg. We forged a closer relationship than ever before, founded upon his sudden need to confide. I was just old enough to contribute something towards filling his emotional void, though his soul-baring would probably have been better done in company other than that of a teenage son. My animosity towards my mother was intensified by some brutally frank conversations about the family which I held in those days with Mac’s sister Beryl. Aunt Beryl, herself childless and now widowed, spoilt me delightfully, and won my devotion in proportion. Never one to mince words, she made some intimate observations and surmises about my mother’s shortcomings which caused my naïve sixteen-year-old hair to stand on end.

In maudlin moments, Father offered me two pieces of counsel which I remember, one enlightened, the other not. First, he urged me to learn
to respond to ‘the challenge of a blank sheet of paper’. At the time, the phrase meant nothing. Later, when I became a professional writer, it came to seem everything. Father’s invocation echoes in my memory to this day, when I sit down at my desk, switch on the computer and feel a surge of excitement as I stare into an empty screen which it is my happy responsibility to fill. Second, Father advised me gravely to marry a girl with fat legs, ‘because they are better in bed’. Even at an age when I had no opportunity to explore the sexual merits of girls with either fat or thin legs, this seemed a questionable proposition. Poor Father. Thereafter, though he sometimes bestirred himself and sparkled in company, a melancholy possessed him which became ever more oppressive with the passage of the years.

My mother, by contrast, flourished without him. Always highly competent, she enjoyed a more successful professional life, and soon a livelier personal one, than she had ever known. She wrote a scintillating column for the
Daily Mail
, for which she was handsomely rewarded. She went on holiday to the Mediterranean sunspots and great cities she had always loved. She was spared the wretchedness of Mac’s drinking, and of her alienation from him. She was lonely for a time, and clung as closely to Clare as Mac did to me, which served to deepen a divide between brother and sister. Mac, never much interested in girl children, made matters worse by taking scant heed of his daughter for the last twenty years of his life.

Anne wrote a 1963 column for the
Daily Mail
in which she reflected at the age of fifty about regrets in the first half of her life. She described herself as having just passed an important watershed: the previous Thursday, she had stayed in bed all morning reading
La Chartreuse de Parme
without a sense of guilt. She lamented the oppressive discipline of her upbringing which, she said, had induced in her ‘no real virtue, but a tedious, blighting conscientiousness. I have always been nervous of pleasure. In my twenties, and even in my thirties, I was obsessed with work before play, reluctant to read a novel in the morning or go to the movies in the afternoon.’ She regretted, she said, her first forty years in which she never touched a drink. She claimed at last to have cast off the old Puritan legacy, to have forsworn
competitiveness. She asserted that her greatest happiness now lay in her children, and said that she felt much pride that I had lately gained my parachutist’s wings: ‘I think that unless a woman has a vocation, like teaching or music, which absorbs her emotionally, she is only half a woman if she is childless.’ Almost half a century ago, I read that bit with a curling lip.

Anne went on to say that she regretted setting her own professional sights too low: ‘I do not find journalism a fully satisfying career, but I am afraid that after years of writing captions, paragraphs and short articles, I may have lost the powers of concentration needed to write something longer and deeper. I ought to have written bad poetry at 17 and bad novels at 25 to get my hand in.’ She never wrote a big book, but now undertook some ambitious foreign reporting assignments for the
Mail
– for instance contributing a series from America after the assassination of President Kennedy. Somewhat to my surprise and disbelief, now as in 1963, she described herself in print as ‘naturally amorous’. Although her liking for men was not in doubt, she frightened the life out of most. I have always believed that she enjoyed the experience of receiving admiration more than the reality of intimacy. In any event, for a time she threw herself into work because her personal life was sterile.

Mac was rescued from disaster by a woman. In June 1963, after eighteen torrid, alcoholic months in the wilderness, he married Anthea, widow of his publisher, Michael Joseph. She was thirty-eight, which then seemed to me impossibly old, while Father was fifty-four. A woman of energy, intelligence, wit and almost saintly disposition, she required all these qualities to deal with Mac, and indeed with me. She already had two children of her own, aged ten and twelve, and soon gave birth to another with Father – my half-sister Harriet, born in 1964. In a perverse moment Mac invited cousin Stephen, whom he had always detested, to become one of Harriet’s godfathers. I suspect that Anthea’s wishes influenced the choice – Stephen was one of our few apparently reputable family connections. The reconciliation was short-lived, and Father soon returned to bad-mouthing his cousin.

Mac – and I at erratic intervals – moved into Brown’s Farm, Anthea’s house in the village of Old Basing, near Basingstoke. There was no alternative, for he was effectively penniless. Anthea embarked upon the Herculean task of house-training him. Gin had played too large a part in Father’s life for too long now to be abandoned. His consumption could only be controlled. He loved his new wife, and was deeply grateful for what she did for him. But he was no more convincing a stepfather to her children than I was a stepbrother. He could not undo the self-destructive habits of a lifetime. The happiness of their marriage was a tribute to her fortitude. She controlled her temper even when, for instance, Mac parked the car outside the local pub with its handbrake off, whereupon it rolled into a wall. She humoured his whims, even though she was obliged to limit his expenditure. He became dependent upon her counsel, management – and income. She remained a director of Michael Joseph, by then owned by the Thomson Organisation, and eventually became the firm’s chairman. Anthea’s money paid almost all the bills at Brown’s Farm. At the outset, I think she supposed that she was marrying a successful writer and ‘television personality’. She soon discovered, without any evident display of resentment, that Mac’s career had entered a decline which could not be reversed.

Her energy and versatility were astonishing. She was born into a generation of working women who tried to do it all, almost singlehanded. She embraced the domestic round far more convincingly than Anne. Many evenings, I saw her sweep into the kitchen at Brown’s Farm, back from a day’s work in London, toss aside her briefcase and address cooking the dinner without breaking step. She arranged the flowers in church, read the children bedtime stories, took a manuscript to bed, watered the gin, picked broad beans, pursued a vigorous social life. She was astonishingly restrained in her complaints about my excesses – emptying cigarette boxes, injuring cars, eating extravagant quantities of food and bringing home conspicuously unsuitable girlfriends. Once, after we had been discussing a woman in the village whom everyone found tiresome, Anthea muttered to herself, quite unself-consciously, ‘I must learn to like her more.’ I knew she meant
it. Thenceforward she would do her utmost to be nicer to this dreary creature. Even though I was incapable of such generosity myself, I deeply admired it in Anthea. I have always thought that the strain of bearing so many burdens, in her career as well as her domestic life, contributed decisively to her early death.

Living with Anthea, Mac acquired a new circle of acquaintances, in some cases friends, among ‘her’ authors at Michael Joseph. They saw a lot of Dick Francis, the champion jockey turned champion thriller-writer, and his wife Mary who contributed so much to his books. Alan Wykes, a fellow Savage Club author, dedicated one of his books to Mac, who was characteristically untroubled – unlike Anthea, who was mortified – when it proved to be about venereal disease. There was John Masters, whose novels of British India are terrific, and sadly neglected today; Richard Gordon, author of the ‘Doctor’ books; Alf Wight – ‘James Herriot’, best-selling Yorkshire vet; the veteran Winifred Clemence Dane; country writer Dora Saint – ‘Miss Read’; and more unexpectedly, James Baldwin. Jimmy once left a niece as a guest at Brown’s Farm for some days while he went off on an expedition of his own. The village was amazed and vastly entertained by the spectacle of Mac walking the lanes hand-in-hand with a small black child. Only Anthea could have reconciled him to such a responsibility.

From the mid-1960s onwards, however, while Mac found much happiness in marriage, his career flagged. Intensely stubborn, he adopted courses which he thought appropriate for himself, heedless of the view of others, including employers. Then, as always, any successful television performer needed to take close heed of the tortured, Byzantine politics of the BBC. Without the support of some reigning patrons in the corridors of power at Television Centre, talent alone has never sufficed to maintain access to the airwaves. Father’s indifference to the shifting sands at
Tonight
, his refusal to notice the rise of new powers and the eclipse of old ones at Lime Grove Studios, cost him dear.