Did You Really Shoot the Television? (27 page)

Mother concluded that it was in all our best interests to get on with a new life, with a minimum of violent intrusions from me. I wrote to her, during one of our many rows: ‘I understand you much better than you like to think, because in character we are very much alike. I’ve always admired you immensely, but you can frighten me very much…When you tell me how boring my girlfriends are, I’m often well aware that you’re right, but it doesn’t help me much.’ Father wrote to me in those days, dissenting from something Anne had written in her
Mail
column, and observing: ‘I am afraid that she has a lot of the ruthlessness of character which you have yourself, and which I hope you will grow out of.’

For long periods of the 1960s and 1970s, Mother and I saw little or nothing of each other, largely by my choice. To a remarkable degree, from the age of sixteen onwards I lived my own life, and indeed at seventeen I moved into a rented flat in Holland Park. I saw my parents as a visitor, rather than as an established resident at either of their homes. In the years thereafter my peripatetic, chronically restless existence would have commanded the respect of the Flying Dutchman. Relations with Mother did not improve when she told me, soon after I was twenty-one, that she had just made a new will, leaving everything to my sister. She believed, she said, that I would always be capable of taking care of myself, while Clare would need her support. This painful little revelation coloured my attitude to her for the ensuing forty-odd years. Her judgement was entirely rational, especially as I had chosen to throw in my lot so decisively with Father. Father, indeed, excluded Clare from his own will. But I have always regretted that she thought it necessary to tell me what she had done.

Likewise, she later came to see me, urging that I should withdraw my name as a candidate for the Beefsteak Club, which then seemed to me to represent the summit of glamour and august company: ‘It’s a typical nonsense of your father’s, to organise this. Osbert’s a member,
and it will be too embarrassing for him to have to meet you there!’ I joined the Beefsteak anyway, with the aid of John Betjeman and Alec Waugh, and the roof did not fall in. A few years later she wrote to her old friend Charles Wintour, then my boss at the
Evening Standard
, urging him to make me an executive rather than allow me to continue a career as a war correspondent which she thought likely to get me killed. She said: ‘He is not good with people – nobody knows it better than I – but most of the good executives I know in Fleet Street have been bastards: think of H. Keeble and Chris[tiansen].’ I knew nothing of those remarks for thirty years after they were written. Reading them in middle age, when I became editor of the
Evening Standard
and found myself in possession of my predecessors’ correspondence, I felt unsure whether to be touched by her anxiety for my survival, or mortified by her brutal assessment of my character.

Belatedly, I acknowledged that with Osbert, Mother achieved a happiness and security which she had earned after so many years of toil and trouble. My own behaviour, my fiercely aggressive support for Father, provoked her beyond endurance. She was correct – though I wish she had not said it in writing – to assert to Charles Wintour that I lacked any gift for getting along with people. My late teens and early twenties were a lonely period, full of more anger and frustration than even most adolescents inflict upon themselves. In the eyes of the world I was a prime specimen of what Victorian novelists called a hobbledehoy – awkward, selfish and charmlessly assertive. I blamed my parents for the fact that I possessed no social circle, rarely got invited to parties, and was utterly at a loss when I did attend one. I maintained the habit of making trouble in any house in which I found myself, long after the age at which most young men grow out of it.

I was rescued from delinquency by work. At an early age I found happiness and an early flicker of success in a life which I embraced with passion. In 1963, Father’s influence at Lime Grove narrowly sufficed to assist me to a gap-year job in the gift of Alasdair Milne, as a researcher on a huge project which BBC TV was then launching,
The Great War
series. This proved a wonderful initiation to the world of adults, and of the media. I thrilled to the glamour of the business,
and exulted in the perquisites of admission to the BBC circle – for instance, joining the Saturday-night studio audience of
That Was The Week That Was
with a young BBC librarian named Penny Levinson, whom I dated for a while. She found me at seventeen too alarming to deserve a lasting place in her life, and a few years later she married Michael Grade. I had to wait another thirty years for her to marry me.

It is hard to exaggerate the thrill of working for the BBC, even in the humblest capacity, during the early 1960s. Brimming over with talent and novelty, it seemed the place where the most exciting things in Britain were happening. There came a moment when I chanced to meet Mac amid the throng at the bar of the BBC Club. After we had exchanged greetings, he murmured to me: ‘My boy, I think the moment has come at which you should stop calling me “Daddy” and address me as “Father”.’ It was a significant rite of passage. In the offices of
The Great War
I was charmed to discover that, for a change, my grown-up colleagues were in trouble more often than I was, usually as a consequence of complex sexual intrigues. I began to discover that happiness could be something more positive than freedom from imminent indictment. I took two days off from work to sit the Oxford entrance exam, and was surprised and not altogether pleased to be rewarded with an exhibition to University College, which some months later removed me from the BBC.

I found Oxford no more congenial than had my mother thirty years earlier. Nobody seemed to appreciate me, and I gave them no reason to do so. Having started to earn a living wage, I hated becoming a broke student again. I began to moonlight as a fixer for foreign TV companies filming in Britain, and spent vacations working on the
Evening Standard
’s Londoner’s Diary – an introduction I owed to my mother, who did her best to help my career when I would allow her to. She heavily rewrote the drafts of the first two newspaper articles which appeared under my byline in the
Standard
in 1964. One was entitled: ‘IN ATHENS, THE HUNGRY HITCH-HIKER SELLS HIS BLOOD’, which is what I had done. The other piece was a lament for my inability to find a girlfriend at Oxford.

At the end of my first Oxford year, the
Standard
’s editor Charles Wintour offered me a staff job. ‘I am impressed by your potential,’ he wrote to me at Univ., ‘and am prepared to make quite an investment in you, if you stick around for a reasonable period.’ Here was an unprecedented assertion of confidence in the possibility that I might have a future outside a reformatory, for which I will remain grateful to Charles for the rest of my life. Rumour within the paper, deeply resentful of my precocious admission to the payroll, suggested that the editor was my mother’s lover, or, even more exotically, that I was his illegitimate offspring. In reality, I think, mere commonplace ne potism was at work. Charles also at the time employed the sons of Eric Linklater and Alan Moorehead on the Londoner’s Diary. He liked to suppose that journalistic talent could be inherited.

Ignoring protests from family and tutors I quit my college, thus following my great-great grandfather, grandfather and mother in a family tradition of entering universities, then failing to graduate from them. Eighteen months later, in 1967 when I was twenty-one, I won a fellowship from an American foundation to spend a year in the US, during which I was also able to report for the
Evening Standard
. Indeed, at the paper’s behest I returned to America for several months to contribute to its reporting of the 1968 presidential election.

This protracted absence proved a blessing, perhaps above all to my parents. I recently reread their letters to me during that period, written in response to many homesick and self-pitying communications from me. Both wrote sympathetically but hard-headedly. Anne said, for instance, that I made far too much fuss about the difficulties of living up to the family reputation.

Your father and I are not – repeat not – famous people. I am a successful journalist and your father had a good reputation [I noted the past tense] as a TV personality on a certain type of programme, but that doesn’t make us a difficult family to live up to. The way you talk, we might be the Churchills. I foresee a much better career for you than either of us had.

You are bad at providing interests from within yourself. I
remember when you were 15 or 16 you used to sit in the flat and complain that you had nothing to do, and nothing I suggested seemed to interest you. It is hopeless if you are always going to be dependent on parties and constant action. Your father’s tragedy has been a longing for recognition and fame which made no sense at all, and an opinion (or so he pretended) that he was a great celebrity. Followed, of course and alas, by a corresponding sense of failure if things went wrong. I always thought you were more balanced and saw things more clearly. I’ll go dotty if you, too, are going to be tortured by a false ambition.

Immediately following my return from America in the autumn of 1968, Father wrote me a long letter, full of advice about both my behaviour and recent published examples of my journalism.

I must give you a little paternal advice on prose style. In some of your reports from the US, you have employed too many clichés. Get emphasis out of the construction of the sentence – not by messing about with capital letters and exclamation marks. You use that hackneyed phrase ‘right now’ several times. Think on it, and you will appreciate that it means precisely nothing. It is an Americanism which has dribbled into the Queen’s English because it’s a convenient way of starting a new paragraph when the writer can’t think of a more meaningful way of doing so.

You are such a born writer that you must watch out for these vulgarisms. I am more anxious to underline them because I appreciate the pressures on your style while you have been living in an American idiom. My impression is that, at the moment, in print you are pressing your prose too hard. You are better in many of your letters to me, when you are talking with your hair down. Nothing will stop you from being a successful popular journalist. What I want is for you to be recognised as a fine writer.

Be very careful not to command conversation about your experiences, remarkable as they have been. People can get very bored. Before you know where you are, they will write you off as
an arrogant young fool. The art, my dear son, is to lie low like Brer Rabbit. The great reporters (excluding Bernard Levin, perhaps) are great listeners. I know that I myself am a compulsive talker. I have always regretted it. At your age, it is far more important than it is at mine to play
sotto voce.
I beg you not to show off. Concentrate on letting the other fellow think how much you admire him. That’s the way to get on. If you try to impose your own personality – and this is your especial vice – you will find that you are out in the cold. The game, in getting to the top, is to persuade people that you think they are cleverer than you.

Rereading the other side of that correspondence, there seems no merit in quoting my own twenty-two-year-old words, because these were so conceited, foolish and self-absorbed. I find myself marvelling at the good fortune which enabled me eventually to extricate myself from the mindset into which I had sunk, consumed with impatient and extravagant ambition. The American experience provided the material for my first book,
America 1968: The Fire This Time
, a portrait of the US amid race riots, assassinations and one of its most bitterly contested elections in modern memory. This was published early in 1969, when I was twenty-three. Thereafter my work for the
Evening Standard
, and later the BBC, provided a foundation which compensated, in some degree, for my social shortcomings. I was preserved from self-immolation by the discipline and opportunities offered by Fleet Street and television.

Almost all the counsel offered by both my parents was wise. Yet for years I paid inadequate heed to it. I could never resist picking a fight and airing my opinions. Once, after some rustic lunch guests at Brown’s Farm had gone home, Father said to me: ‘I suppose you think those people are full of admiration for what a clever chap Max Hastings is. They are not. They are saying to each other, “What a cocky young idiot!” You chose to argue with them because you thought they were saying silly things, and so they were. But the great principle in life is to pick enemies your own size. Don’t waste your fire on little people. Fight big people, if you
must, but always be civil as butter to little ones, even if you think they are bloody fools.’

Sometimes, however, differences with big people could also cause trouble. Anthea’s father was a law lord, a grave, humourless, dignified septuagenarian named Charles Hodson. He was a lifelong friend of the notorious hanging judge, Lord Goddard. When Goddard died, Bernard Levin wrote a lacerating column denouncing the old monster and all his works. At the following Sunday lunch, Lord Hodson delivered an enraged broadside against Levin, in which I fancy the words ‘rotten little Jew’ featured. I took issue. Hodson said: ‘Either you leave this table, or I do.’ Family opinion was decisively against me.

There is no purpose in rehearsing such yarns any further. Readers will have got the picture. It was a tribute to Anthea’s forbearance that she continued to endure my visits to Brown’s Farm with good grace until I was belatedly tamed. I tested almost to destruction Bacon’s observation that ‘Youth and discretion are ill-wed companions.’ I learned eventually to love and respect Anthea as a close friend, rather than as a stepmother. By the time I delivered the address at her memorial service in 1981, I knew what a debt of gratitude I, as well as my father, owed to her intelligence, warmth, wit and generosity.

Anne’s life in the years after she began to live with Osbert glittered both socially and professionally. As a famous wit, Osbert was asked everywhere, and now she went with him. At Rose Cottage and in Eaton Square she entertained as she never had done before – artists such as John Piper and Elisabeth Frink, both close friends, the inevitable John B and Elizabeth Cavendish, Roy and Jennifer Jenkins, Anthony Powell, the historian Michael Howard and Mark James, Alan and Lucy Moorehead and many others. The garden at Rose Cottage, sadly neglected in the last years of Anne’s marriage to Mac, was dra matically revived under the stimulus of her new happiness and enthusiasm. In London, the Lancasters were regulars at the European embassies, a milieu for which Osbert had retained a taste since his wartime Foreign Office days.