Did You Really Shoot the Television? (29 page)

Nonetheless, I was able to share with him one last, wonderfully happy sporting experience. In 1970 I was twenty-four, and a reporter for BBC TV’s
24 Hours
programme. I harboured passionate yearnings to fish and shoot, above all in the Highlands of Scotland, but seemed likely to die of old age before receiving invitations to do this for free. From Saigon, where I was working at the time, I wrote to the agents Strutt & Parker, asking whether they had any Scottish
lodges available for rent. If my own children at the age of twenty-four had begun renting Scottish shooting lodges, I should have rushed them into counselling, but such a course seemed to me in 1970 perfectly reasonable. I was starting to tiptoe down Father’s path towards fulfilling fantasies at the cost of financial ruin. Strutts sent back particulars of several places, of which I fixed upon one named the House of Tongue, on the north coast of Sutherland, possessed of 35,000 acres of hill and heather. I arranged to take it for a fortnight in September, and persuaded some friends to come with me and share the cost. I also invited Father.

When September came, chance dictated that I was in Amman, reporting the onset of a Jordanian civil war. With the utmost difficulty and some exercise of subterfuge, I wangled my way back to London on one of the last planes to leave the country for weeks. After reaching Heathrow, I just had time to collect clothes and gear from my flat before meeting the rest of the Tongue party at Euston, to catch the night train north.

Then began one of the romantic idylls of my life. As we sat in the restaurant car, in those days when sleepers possessed such splendid relics of fading grandeur, Father held us entranced with tales of the Highlands, some perhaps founded in reality. He was physically fifteen years more frail than he should have been at the age of sixty-one, but all his old enthusiasm was restored, together with his genius for imbuing a new experience with a sense of adventure.

At Inverness next morning I had arranged to rent two Land Rovers, in which we drove north towards the farther remotenesses of Britain. I was apprehensive, for I had no idea at all of what we were going to. As we topped the hill overlooking the estuary of Tongue, and looked down upon one of the finest and wildest views this island offers, my hopes soared. They were dashed on descending to the shore. The only large house we could see was an undistinguished brick construction. Had I brought a dozen friends here, to share a dump? I knocked on the door. The man who responded explained that this was the youth hostel. The House of Tongue? He pointed around the turn of the estuary.

A few hundred yards along the coast, set on the shoreline encircled by trees, was a great rambling seventeenth-century stone mansion. I ran inside, through room after room carpeted in tartans, beautifully furnished in the period manner. Each window commanded a perfect view. The borders behind blazed with the sort of colour that had faded in England two months earlier. We discovered, quickly enough, that Tongue possessed one of the finest gardens in Scotland. ‘You’re very lucky, my boy,’ said Father wryly. I was laird for a fortnight of the sort of paradise both of us had dreamed of all our lives.

Each day that followed was more blissful than the last. We climbed the great heather hills, shot pigeons, fished mackerel, took a little boat at mortal risk to the offshore islands, struggled to catch salmon in the nearby river, on which we had a beat. The Borgie was wonderfully pretty, but very low. Day after day the fish defied our best efforts with a fly, and even with worms. Then, one morning on a pretty pool named the Shepherd’s, Father tempted a salmon to his fly, played and landed it. Glowing with pleasure, clad in his usual impeccable plus-fours and brogues, he held it aloft for a photograph. It was the last fish he ever caught. I bottled that enchanted moment with him, laid it lovingly in the cellar of memories, and have cherished it ever since. Through several years that followed, I continued to rent the House of Tongue, though the bills nearly ruined me. I regretted not a farthing. Tongue remained, above all, the place where I saw Father as I always imagined him, in sporting fellowship with me. Those days in the northern Highlands laid many ghosts, and opened the promise of all manner of hopes for the future.

Mac’s and Anne’s lives thereafter lapsed into relatively humdrum domesticity, as is the destiny of most of us. The exotic phases of both their careers were ended. My parents, in their respective remarriages, found more contentment than they had ever known. The baton passed to the next generation.

My great-uncle Lewis Hastings died in 1966, at the age of eighty-five, after suffering a stroke while on holiday in Spain with the sorely tried, unlovable Marigold. For all the old boy’s extraordinary appetite for life, he would not have wanted to go on. There was no future for one who anticipated with such distaste the Britain of the forthcoming millennium, prophesying: ‘Soon the pheasant woods will be cleared for corn, mechanised farming will uproot the hedges, the cathedrals will be turned into industrial flats, and in Africa what remains of the antelope will be penned in well-ordered Whipsnades. Virtue will be compulsory, we will buy all our meat from the butcher, and there will be no more cakes and ale. Hunting, in particular, will be put down with a strong hand by the Security Police.’

I know. Don’t say it. Those sentiments seemed hoary even two generations ago. Later, in the 1970s, when I quarrelled with my cousin Stephen, by then a Tory MP and member of the notorious Monday Club, about his impassioned support for the illegal white minority regime in Rhodesia, he said: ‘You always claim to have loved my father so much, but he would turn in his grave to hear all your liberal claptrap.’ This was probably true, but did not diminish my regard for Lewis. He was neither a good nor an enlightened man. But he walked by himself in a manner that seized my imagination, as it had that of my father, and retains it to this day.

Mac was sore that Lewis’s longstanding promise to bequeath his hunting rifles to his favourite nephew went unfulfilled. He often spoke to me of this as a theft from my own ultimate heritage, an instance
of cousin Stephen’s dastardly meddling. In truth, it is more likely that Lewis forgot. In any event, even forty years ago I found it hard to imagine what either Father or I could usefully have done with a couple of elephant guns. As a reporter in Rhodesia during its civil war, I was once offered a chance to shoot a tusker. A game warden suggested that I should join a national-park cull then taking place, to address elephant overpopulation. For a moment I was tempted to accept, as an act of obeisance to the shade of old Lewis. In the end, however, I declined. I am not at all squeamish about other people killing large animals, if it becomes environmentally necessary to do so. But I felt no urge to press the trigger myself. Stephen lived until 2005. I sustained a desultory relationship with him, but the memory of Lewis’s and Father’s disdain lingered in my consciousness, together with a distaste for his rabidly conservative view of society, and in my eyes exaggerated idea of his own rightful place in it.

Nanny died in 1968, at the genteel Kensington hotel to which she retired when my mother could no longer house her. The problem that arises when old retainers work for decades in a modern middle-class family is that such employers have no ready supply of estate cottages in which to accommodate redundant treasures in old age. ‘The pay-off to the system of the old-fashioned nanny,’ Anne wrote crossly and ungratefully, ‘is that they do in time dominate the house to an absurd degree.’ In practical terms, it is hard to imagine what else could have happened to Nanny once Clare was into her teens. But I have always harboured a lingering guilt that we accepted so much from Jessie Strafford for so long, then ruthlessly discarded her.

Money was not an issue, for Nanny’s carefully nurtured savings enabled her to live in comfort. But it was a terrible blow to the poor old thing, after more than sixty years living in the bosom of families – indeed, offering her own ample bosom to the comfort of those families – to find herself alone and friendless in her mid-seventies, left with her football pools and her memories. By a final feudal gesture, she left Clare and me £500 apiece in her will. Clare also inherited her little sapphire engagement ring, relic of an attachment of which none of us ever knew the nature. Yet another among so many tragedies of
the First War, perhaps? My legacy almost paid off my first overdraft, a purpose of which Nanny would have disapproved deeply, never having owed a shilling in her life. The bulk of her estate, some £14,000, she left to the Imperial Cancer Fund, with a legacy to her Sheffield neighbour Mrs Green. Our daily, Mrs Elmer, remarked with bemusement rather than resentment: ‘The funny thing is, Mrs Green told me that she never liked Nanny.’ But who else did the poor, lovely woman have in her lonely life?

Mac died in October 1982, suffering a cerebral haemorrhage a few days before his seventy-third birthday. I was saddened – indeed, deeply angered – that, though his old
Tonight
boss Alasdair Milne was then director-general, the BBC ignored his passing, and sent no representative to his funeral. The Corporation possesses no collective heart or memory. It was left to old colleagues to say nice things. David Attenborough paid a wonderfully generous tribute to Mac as one of the first to bring nature and the countryside to the small screen. A producer who often worked with him, Peter Bale, wrote to me about ‘the debt many of us TV mortals must owe to Macdonald Hastings Esq.: for enlightening us about “English as she is spoke”; for the delight he passed to colleagues through his skill with words, first written, then spoken before the camera, on cue – and usually first take’. Alan Whicker spoke of Mac’s ‘distinctive brand of dauntless enthusiasm’. His old editor at
Picture Post
, Tom Hopkinson, described him as ‘a most lovable man, all the more so for his irascibility, often dissolved into laughter, and his carefully-cherished prejudices’. Antony Jay, who went on to create
Yes, Minister!
, remembered him in his heyday as ‘a master craftsman’. Many television viewers and readers of his books sent me letters telling me how much pleasure they had gained from his work.

I grieved for myself at Father’s death, because I forfeited the joy of his company and the comfort of his pleasure in my successes; but not for him. Years before, he wrote exuberantly: ‘I reckon that if it was appointed that I appear at The Last Judgement seat to account for my sins on earth, with Hilaire Belloc as my first witness, I might be forgiven; my crime was that I seized all the splendid things life had to offer.’ Those days were gone. Anthea, his rock, had died the
previous year of cancer, tragically young at fifty-six. After her passing, Father was tired, lonely, ill and bored. He had done everything he wanted, ruined his health with gin, cigarettes and finally the desert island fiasco. In old age he became ever more quirky and fractious, as most of us do. One night after we had dined together, he said impulsively: ‘Take my Churchills when you go home. I want you to have them, and now is as good a time as any.’ Exulting because Father’s shotguns had totemic status in my eyes, I carried the guncase home with me. Next morning, like Joseph after discovering the loss of his cup, Father rang me in a rage: ‘You’ve stolen my guns!’ he cried in outrage. ‘Bring them back immediately.’ I returned the case without resentment, knowing that this flash of petulance was merely a malady of lonely and alcoholic old age.

I always thought of Father as he had been in his prime, glowing with enthusiasms often mistaken, sometimes absurd, but which his passionate personality never failed to infuse with charm. He was a fine reporter, though at the last a disappointed man. He was nagged by the injustice that, though his own father Basil, together with Lewis and Stephen Hastings, Rolfe and Anne Scott-James, Osbert Lancaster, Anthea Joseph and indeed myself had all been listed in
Who’s Who
, his own name was never deemed worthy of inclusion. On such trifles are our sorrows founded.

I never doubted that he was eccentric, and I came to understand how unsuited he was to marriage, but I loved even his nonsenses. He bequeathed to me a passionate admiration for Britain’s past and its rural heritage, a belief that to be born English, into the nation that spawned Drake and Marlborough, Cobbett and Kipling, is to draw the finest card in the pack of life. If such an admission invites derision in the twenty-first century, it is real nonetheless. From my teens onward, I became acutely conscious of Father’s failings and follies – as what son does not? He was a careless parent to me in childhood, and always so to Clare and Harriet. But from my late teens onward he became an unfailing believer in my star, and at his best an enchanting companion. I adored him. Today, he lies beside his third wife in Old Basing churchyard, beneath a common gravestone,
sculpted to his own design as an open book. The left-hand page reads ‘MACDONALD HASTINGS – AUTHOR – 1909–82’; the right-hand says ‘ANTHEA HASTINGS – PUBLISHER – 1925–81’.

Osbert died at seventy-seven in 1986, having been cruelly disabled by a stroke in 1975. John Betjeman went before him, in 1984. During Osbert’s last years, he often rent Anne’s heart by saying, ‘Oh dear, I do miss John B.’ For my part, whenever now at Covent Garden I see a revival of the enchanting production of the ballet
La Fille Mal Gardée
designed by Osbert, I am reminded of his remarkable gifts. An exhibition of his life and work in 2008 proved the most popular in the Wallace Collection’s history. I regret that I was not more appreciative of him during his lifetime.

For Anne, the loss of Osbert was an almost unbearable blow. Having waited so long to find domestic happiness, it was snatched from her. She wrote: ‘I have been just half a person since.’ The last twenty-three years of her life were shadowed by loneliness. In the immediate aftermath of Osbert’s death, although not in the least morbid by disposition, she spent many hours gazing at his photograph, and indeed talking to it. She wrote him a long series of letters, which she found a great consolation: ‘I poured out all my feelings and unhappiness, but also gave him the day’s gossip about our friends. I reported the news of the day, including political incidents. I felt that Osbert would now, as always, want to be in the swim.’ A year after his death, she stopped writing the letters, because she had come to terms with her loss. Anne’s last decades were redeemed chiefly by her pleasure in the successes of my sister Clare and her clever daughter Calypso. She made no secret of her boredom, often remarking, ‘I’ve lived too long. I want to go.’ Dismissing talk of a birthday present as one late anniversary dawned, she observed caustically: ‘Getting to ninety-five is scarcely a cause for rejoicing.’

I was moved by Mother’s courage in the final phase of her life, and grew to understand that this had always been among her virtues. As infirmity increasingly dogged her, she never complained of it. Alone, her mind razor-sharp to the end, she returned to reading Virgil in Latin, Flaubert in French, to pass the long, dreary days in
her Chelsea flat and finally in a Hampshire retirement home. Her judgements on politics, newspapers, the arts, and her children’s conduct of our own lives, remained trenchant on her good days, acidic on her bad ones. At the age of ninety-three, after she reread Kingsley Amis’s
Take a Girl Like You
, a novel I have always enjoyed, she deflated my enthusiasm with a critique of the book’s repetitive jokes and excessive length. She rediscovered Trollope with a pleasure that surprised me, because his novels are characterised by their generosity of spirit, a quality absent from her own nature.

Her capacity to make Clare and me quail remained undiminished to the last. One day when Mother was in her late eighties, I told her that I entirely respected her decision, declared to me thirty years earlier, that she would leave her entire estate to my sister, and now also to Calypso. But I added that I would love to have one of her good pictures. She said nothing, and I went home knowing it would be foolish to cherish expectations. A year or two later, however, she telephoned: ‘You know how much you’ve always liked the Picasso?’ Yes, indeed – this was a coloured drawing of a woman bequeathed to her by a close friend which always seemed to me, and to others, rather wonderful. ‘Would you like to buy it?’ I choked. She went on: ‘I’ve decided to sell the picture. I thought you should have first refusal.’ I said to my wife Penny, ‘If I murder her, I shall plead extreme provocation and no jury will convict.’

Anne’s judgements on human frailties, including those of the family, were rarely mistaken, but often drove the knife deep into old wounds. For more than sixty years I failed in my quest to gain her approval – which was, of course, what many of the difficulties in our relationship were about. In 2002, when I told her I was getting a knighthood, she at once suspected – perhaps correctly, for all I know – the hand of my close friend Roy Jenkins. ‘I suppose Roy fixed it for you!’ she observed laconically. I went away amazed that I still cared so much that she was pleased so little. I lacked Clare’s gift for bending with the storms and evading confrontation. Maybe also Penny is right in her surmise, that in Mother’s later years she came to believe I had received more than was my due in life, while she herself had garnered less.

While she may have lacked charity and self-knowledge, my admiration for her gifts, and gratitude for whatever share of them she passed to me, were very great. Michael Howard once said, in response to some stricture I expressed about her, ‘I think your mother is the most intelligent woman I have ever met.’ This was no mean tribute from a former Regius Professor. All that was lacking between her and me was love. We had too much in common ever to feel comfortable with each other. The success of human relationships is determined by who makes who feel good. In this, Mother and I failed. Had I taxed her about her behaviour towards me, she would have answered: ‘What can you expect, after years in which you scarcely spoke to me, and I barely met your children?’ Touché. Each of us inflicted savage emotional wounds upon the other. I tease my own offspring by asking them how they would define the perfect parents. The proper answer, of course, is that there are no such animals. Our perceptions of the virtues of other people’s daddies and mummies by comparison with our own are almost invariably founded upon incomplete knowledge. But only in late adulthood do most of us acknowledge this.

I look back without much embarrassment on my childhood, because children may expect absolution for crimes committed in short trousers. I feel shame, however, about the discourtesies, follies and cruelties I committed in my late teens and twenties towards family and friends. I am tempted to write a circular letter of apology to all those who had to live, work, worst of all sleep with me in those years. Nothing in my parents’ or step-parents’ faults of omission or commission could have justified the selfishness of my behaviour. I was raised in comfort and well educated, inherited some talents, went out into the world fit and qualified to earn a living. How could I have supposed myself hard done by, and for so long borne such a baggage of anger and aggression? ‘Your family has a lot of issues,’ my daughter once observed in some bewilderment after an evening among them.