Did You Really Shoot the Television? (3 page)

Edward carried to extremes a refusal to display signs of alarm, less still panic. Once, two of the younger boys hired a steam engine from Tuppence-the-Most. After it had been running for some time, delighting the Tribe, their parents went to bed. Lewis and Basil set about discovering how fast the engine could be driven. They poured fuel into its furnace, even breaking up their siblings’ toy theatre to feed the flames. There was a thunderous explosion, smoke filled the house. The nurse woke, and hammered in terror at the Pater’s door. ‘Come out sir, come out!’ she cried. ‘The house is on fire!’ The Pater’s response caused the children to howl with laughter: ‘All in good time, Nurse, all in good time. Wait till I find the coat I usually wear on these occasions.’ When Edward emerged, however, he went out into the street and rang the fire alarm, causing the brigade to appear, its horse-drawn engines galloping up the street. The children were ecstatic, the Mater furious. She pointed out that the fire could have been extinguished with a few buckets of water. She was neither the first nor the last Hastings wife invited to endure much at the hands of her husband and offspring.

At ten, Lewis and Basil were sent to Hodder, Stonyhurst’s prep school. They proved successful schoolboys, both in the classrooms and on the sports field, winning prizes, Basil wrote later, without extravagant effort. Edward’s letters to his sons display the same relentlessly didactic spirit as do those of his own father Hugh to himself, a generation earlier. Because the boys had never known any other kind of father, and lived in an age and a family powerfully influenced by religion, they seem to have been untroubled by screeds which were, more often than not, exam papers.

‘My darling son Basil,’ Edward wrote from Herm on 10 October 1892,

I have your letter of 6 October. I notice you by mistake left the name of the archbishop blank. Please (1) supply the blank. Mamma has received the manual of Prayers for Youth, and I have got the list of books, for which I thank you. (2) please send the timetable. Please (3) answer question 34 more fully. I have told Gladys you thank her for her letter. (4) find out the derivation of the word ‘blandyke’. (5) what does ‘Night Studies’ in the Stonyhurst Calendar mean? (6) have you got Ethel’s umbrella? (7) have they any rules at Hodder, and can you send me a copy of them.

There followed an extract from Gladys’s journal of their Channel Islands holiday, then further bullet points, culminating with:

(17) I regret to hear of the drowning of the Jesuit you mention…By the bye – don’t call us your parents, but ‘my dear pater and mater’. It is a point of the utmost significance that when you leave Stonyhurst you should enter the world well apprised of its dangers and infinitely on your guard against bad company and the love of vanities and pleasures. You cannot fortify yourself too much against these evils. You must bring along with you all your religion. I wish you to pray to God to know your vocation.

The barrage of questions was punctuated with fragments of whimsy: ‘Have you asked for Lumley’s
Select Plays Of Shakespeare
? – which you lost.
Responde mihi
. Have you found Smith’s Latin Grammar?,
respondez s’il vous plaît
. I thank you for the programme of the concert of the 1st of November 1892 which was not, as you allege, a Sunday, but a Tuesday – Please apologise.’

Soon after Basil was promoted from Hodder to the main school at Stonyhurst, on 15 February 1893, his father demanded:

Did you cry when you left Hodder?

Do you suck your thumb still?

Do you feel at home at Stonyhurst?

Do you like any of the boys?

Do the boys kick or ill-treat you?

Please answer all questions.

And a week later:

We were sorry to hear that you were spending your holidays in the Infirmary. Did you offer up the sickness to God ‘all for thee, Oh my God – To do thy will, o God’. If you did not – you missed a grand opportunity of earning merit in the sight of God, for this sickness was a great disappointment to you – entailing as it did the loss of 15 days skating. Did you get any skating at all before you were taken ill? The 3rd term’s Report has come. You have attained only 13 marks in Religious Doctrine as against a possible 75 of marks attainable!!!

Edward’s obsession with recording trivia amuses his descendants, but suggests eccentricity of heroic proportions. In great-grandfather, pedantry tipped over into dottiness.

Basil’s Stonyhurst diary was as banal as most schoolboy records, as shown by this entry in 1894: ‘84 more days…Retreat began today. Association. I played right-wing and got two goals, 17 marks for my Greek theme. I have saved 9d. Xmas presents: Lewis got 2 pocket knives, a top hat, a purse; I got a pack of Snap cards, 2 coloured tops; sweets; a steerable balloon; parlour cricket; an artificial nose.’ More interesting was his catalogue of books read. First, there were those from the Spiritual Library:
St Paul of the Cross
,
St Elizabeth of Hungary
,
The Little Flowers of St Francis
. Then came works that he read for pleasure. He listed seventy-six titles, and many were exactly those tales of adventure which his own son, and later I, his grandson, in due course learned to love. G.A. Henty and Walter Scott figured prominently among favourite authors. Basil mentioned with special enthusiasm
Bonnie Prince Charlie
,
Tales of Daring and Peril
,
The Talisman
,
St George for England
,
In the Dashing Days of Old
,
A Cornet of Horse
,
Stirring Stories by Land and Sea
,
Cutlass & Cudgel
. A passion for books, and for historical romance, has persisted in the family. To
give Edward his due, he did not allow his preoccupation with religion to deny the children fun.

More and more of his father’s letters to Basil included lines of congratulation on prizes won, runs and goals scored. But Edward could never abandon the habit of admonition, as in April 1894: ‘Your poem on Stonyhurst is disfigured by things attractive to the senses being given more prominence than things in which the mind plays a part.’ Nine months later, in January 1895, Edward was quoting Samuel Butler: ‘Nothing is more dangerous and nice and more difficult than for a man to speak much of himself without discovering a complacency in himself…and without discovering symptoms of secret self-love and pride.’ On 22 March, he advised Basil: ‘In your essay on the capture of Gibraltar you might bring in these saints as follows: “Not only did the capture of Gibraltar lead to the establishment of the Moorish dominion in Spain, but indirectly it may be said to have led to numberless martyrs sealing their fidelity with their blood. Had not Gibraltar been captured by the Moors it may be doubted whether saints like ss Nunilo and Alodia would have had the opportunity of winning their crowns.”’

As Lewis and Basil grew older, money matters intruded with increasing frequency into their father’s postal injunctions to them, as in this succinct note of 12 October 1896: ‘Dear Basil, please return enclosed bills with your observations. Don’t have any more neckties.
Pater tuus
S. Edward Hastings.’ Immense pains were taken to economise on their journeys to and from school. As an end of term approached, Edward dispatched a banknote to Basil with these lines: ‘3rd class railway ticket Whalley to S. Pancras 17-6; margin for contingencies 2-6. £1 supplied. Please give me a written account of how you spend it, and hand back to me the balance. Lewis omitted to write and acknowledge receipt of the £1.10s. This was a solecism on his part.’

Shillings mattered to the Hastingses.

In 1898 Edward’s eldest son Lewis, my great-uncle, was in his last year at Stonyhurst when a seismic shock fell upon him and the family. He was accused by the Jesuits of a homosexual relationship, and sacked. Lewis – big, bold, passionate Lewis – emphatically denied wrongdoing. His father, however, insisted that the Jesuits could not be mistaken. Edward took the part of the school against his eldest son, prompting a breach between them that was never healed. Here was the most unsympathetic aspect of the Pater’s religious fervour – a belief that Mother Church was incapable of error.

Lewis responded in a manner worthy of one of G.A. Henty’s wronged young men, of whom he had read so many tales. Always attracted by the notion of wild places, he had devoured the writings of the great African hunters, Selous and Gordon-Cumming. Now, shaking the dust of England from his feet, he ran away to South Africa, working his passage before the mast on a sailing ship, with all his worldly possessions crammed into an orange box. On landing at Cape Town in the midst of the Boer War, he joined a group of young professional hunters who eked a living supplying meat to the mining community. Later, still conforming to a storyline stolen from fiction, he served for a couple of years in the Cape Mounted Police. In its ranks he found himself perfectly at home among other runaways, adventurers and remittance men. He fell in love with Africa, and spent the happiest years of his life there.

There is no record of the row about Lewis, but it must have inflicted a deep trauma on such a family as the Hastingses. Basil’s last years
at Stonyhurst were clouded by the memory of his elder brother’s disgrace, whatever his own academic successes. After leaving the school he briefly enrolled at King’s College, London, but quit almost certainly because there was insufficient money to fund him. For the third time in three generations, the education of a young Hastings was cut short. In 1902 he became a clerk in the War Office at a salary of £75 a year. There he remained for the next eight years, though his energies and ambitions became increasingly focused upon freelance journalism.

Only a few months after Basil started work, the family suffered a new blow. Edward’s health was never good. In April 1896 he had visited a specialist, Sir Dyce Duckworth, to discuss his persistent cough. He recorded afterwards that Sir Dyce ‘noticed certain blood vessels below the breast and said I was a hot-tempered man but the temper was soon over. Advised me to discontinue shaving – go for my holiday to a district without trees like Tunbridge Wells or Malvern; eat fat bacon – avoid catching cold; open window of bedroom at night – said I would live 90 years more.’ This diagnosis emphasises the quackery which prevailed a century ago, among even supposedly distinguished medical men.

In September 1903, at the age of fifty-three, Edward suffered a heart attack, collapsed and died while bathing at Shanklin, Isle of Wight. Only a few weeks later his eldest child Ethel, just twenty-four, died of consumption – tuberculosis, then still an incurable blight upon mankind. Lying in a Bournemouth nursing home with her mother at her bedside, she said feebly, ‘I am very sorry for you, Mamma…Oh, Mamma, I’m dying.’ Lizzie Hastings said, ‘Never mind, darling, dear Jesus will take care of you.’ The girl said, ‘Oh yes, I will be with Jesus tonight.’ Her mother asked Ethel to give her love to Edward, then the girl was gone. Lizzie wrote to Lewis in Natal: ‘It would be selfish to wish her back, God’s will be done. I’m sure she will pray for us all very much in her Heavenly Home. Father Luck said he was sure she had gone straight to Heaven. She had a lovely hearse and two mourning coaches.’ Lewis arranged his own Mass for his sister at Kimberley’s Catholic church.

I have no idea how the family coped financially after Edward died. There was probably some life insurance, because people such as the Pater took pains over such things. Somehow, the younger children’s education was completed. Fortunately or otherwise, when the First World War came four of Edward’s sons proved eligible for commissions, in an age when to become an officer it was necessary to ‘pass for a gentleman’. One of the younger boys later attracted public attention of the most unwelcome kind, being tried at Winchester assizes, convicted and imprisoned on charges of homosexual behaviour. But that scandal lay in the future. In the Edwardian years, Edward’s children had neither fame nor notoriety.

Their circumstances remained very modest. Almost all set up London homes south of the river. They remained inhabitants of the world of Mr Pooter, albeit a literate corner of it. A typical entry in the
Catholic Herald
for May 1904 reports: ‘A successful concert was given on Thursday evening in the aid of the mission, at Peckham Public Hall, under the direction of Claude H. Hastings. The vocal talent was represented by the Rev. W. Alton, Miss Beryl Hastings, Miss Muriel Hastings and Mr A.J. Hastings. The following gentlemen acted as stewards: Messrs. J.D., W.D., and J.A. Newton, Master E.J. Hastings.’ The Church still loomed large in the family’s existence – their aunt Emily, Edward’s sister, presided as Mother Superior at a convent in Roehampton until her death in 1920. Basil, who lived in Denmark Hill, became a pillar of local Catholic charities, notably the St Vincent de Paul Society, for which he organised and acted in local theatricals and concerts. The
South London Press
reported in March 1906: ‘Few Catholic laymen are better known in South London than Mr B. Macdonald Hastings…because of the work which he has done for the Church in Southwark, for the poor and destitute. Year after year he has organised an entertainment for the benefit of the poor at St George’s Cathedral mission.’

A jovial, enthusiastic, eagerly sociable man, Basil contributed with increasing regularity to newspapers and magazines. He published light verse, much of it about cricket, together with snippets of wit in gossip columns such as: ‘ “Kiss and never tell” is a poor adage for
the billiard table. It is just the kissing that does tell’…‘The consistent borrower has the immense satisfaction of knowing that when he dies he will have finished ahead of the world’…‘A clean straw hat in May is an infallible sign of solvency.’ This sort of thing may not make a modern audience roll in the aisles, but a century ago it played well with readers of the
Bystander
,
London Opinion
, the
Star
and suchlike. Basil yearned to escape from his servitude at the War Office. As the first decade of the century advanced, he acquired a modest journalistic reputation.

In 1907 he started to ‘go steady’ with the girl who became his wife, the love of his life. Billie – her full name was Wilhelmina Creusen White – was pretty, gentle, and Catholic. She lived with her parents in Peckham. Later, when some members of the family developed social pretensions, they treated Billie with condescension, complaining that she was dull, unlettered and ‘common’. This was unjust. A woman full of kindness and good nature who had much to suffer, she proved a devoted wife in good times and bad. And the Hastingses of Trinity Square, Borough, were scarcely pillars of
Debrett’s
.

Basil began a correspondence with Billie on 19 January 1907, dispatching the first of many passionate letters which,
inter alia
, reveal a fascination with her underclothes: ‘Dear Little Wilhelmina with the very long name…I am going to bed to dream of your tantalising little feet, your brown stockings, your blue garters, your pink knees and lovely foaming petticoats and things. I send you heaps of kisses for all of them.’

On 6 August 1908, he wrote her his last letter as a bachelor, on War Office crested paper, anticipating the joys of married bliss the following week: ‘I am going to kiss you in an entirely different way next Monday night, and somewhere you never dreamt of…’

In less fanciful vein, the day after their marriage in Peckham, Billie’s mother wrote to her daughter, describing what happened at the wedding party after the bride and groom went away. Mrs White’s letter conveys a nice sense of the genteel society in which they lived, and of its simple pleasures:

The Pines, Lyndhurst Road, Peckham S.E.

My dear Mina, you asked me to tell you everything what happened after you went. First they made a beastly mess with the confetti, & I think I am developing a new complaint. The symptoms are putting my finger in my mouth & making a dab at some coloured pieces of paper on the floor, well to return to the beginning again as soon as you left Willy and Harold had to see about getting home because Willy had to get to Windsor. So while Harold was racing around Peckham to try and find a taxi, I made tea which was very much liked by the ladies and also the strawberries and cream. Mr Smith had arrived by then and joined us. Mrs Mont was obliged to go by tram, then Mr Eastern waltzed
The Merry Widow
with Mrs Gordon, their tall hats stuck at a most ridiculous angle. Then the girls waltzed a little to Beryl playing. She was very jollie [sic] and nice, she kept us alive. After a while Father Alton had to go and Mr Eastern also. I think myself that he is rather afraid of his brother George. He made two or three trys [sic] to go, and at last ran down the road like mad. Then Mrs Hastings and the girls went, leaving us alone with pere Leo
il y avait encore quelque chose dans le bouteille n’est ce pas.

This narrative continues for many pages, before concluding: ‘There is no need to send you my hopes & wishes for you both because you know them, but may God and the blessed Virgin shower you both with blessings and may you and your
husband
be Pals to the end, is the one wish of your loving
mother
.’

Liz Hastings, Edward’s widow, also wrote to her new daughter-in-law the day after the wedding: ‘Does Basil know he had a column in the
Morning Leader
on Saturday? I forget the title…You must have had dreadful trouble with confetti. Well, dearest Mina, I must draw this scribble to a close with much love and the hope that you will always be very happy in
this
world and the
next
. Very affectionately your mother L. Hastings.’

Basil indeed found happiness with his Billie. They had two children: a son, my father Douglas Macdonald Hastings, born in October
1909; and a daughter, Beryl Ursula, who arrived two years later. The Basil Hastingses gradually drifted apart from the rest of the Tribe. Only Lewis featured much in their later lives. None of the other brothers or sisters made much mark on the world. Gladys, indeed, chose to leave it, following her great-aunt Emily into a convent and taking the veil. Among the others, though all remained churchgoers, religion no longer played the dominant, indeed oppressive, role which it had done in the lives of Hugh and Edward Hastings. Basil addressed worldly concerns with more ambition and greater success than either his unlucky father or grandfather.

Lewis, meanwhile, was cutting an exuberant swathe across South Africa. He adopted a lifestyle so remote from those of his forebears as to defy any notion of inherited values. It was as if he set out to compensate for generations of stiff-collared family respectability and piety by cramming a century’s misdeeds and extravagances into a single lifetime. He was also writing verse. Here is a fragment of doggerel, inevitably Kipling pastiche, published in a South African newspaper in 1903, while he was serving with the Mounted Police.

When I was out in Africa amaking of my pile,

I met a sort of auxiliary bloke got up in reg’lar style;

He was sitting over a Kaffir pot concocting a sort of stew,

‘And so,’ says I, ‘excuse me please, but who the deuce are you?’

Says he, ‘I’m His Majesty’s half-and-half, policeman and soldier too.’

They can handle a sword or carbine, a lance or a billiard cue,

And what they learned of botany was never learned at Kew.

They can follow the spoor of a cattle thief from the bleating of a ewe,

Though they’re only blooming hermaphrodites, policemen and

soldiers, too.

Since then I’ve met them everywhere, a-sleeping under the skies,

Hard as a packet of tenpenny nails, the sort as never dies.

They ain’t quite strict teetotallers, they like their Mountain Dew,
And like it, of course, just half-and-half, whisky and soda too. With some dop and a government blanket, they lie in the air so clear, On the wide veldt in the moonlight with their troop-horse hobbled

near.

Lewis wrote much later, at the end of a life rich in incident:

In De Quincy’s words, I have taken happiness in its solid and its liquid form, both boiled and unboiled. The world is so full of beasts, birds, fishes. The swoop of pratincoles on a Kalahari locust swarm. Rosy circles of flamingos above a salt marsh. Crocodiles on Zambesi sandbanks, and the great shapes of hippo walking by night past the camp-fire. Salmon leaping the fall in a Highland river. And sounds – the thunder of hooves of a great herd of wildebeest. The high, singing note of a ship’s rigging in a full breeze (the crew of that ship lived in a filthy rat-haunted fo’c’sle, but they had a new Bible apiece given to them by the kind shipping company). Smells – the damp smell of Africa around the Primasole Bridge in the Sicily campaign. The linked odours of horse and leather in night marches of the older war. The smell of a beech wood in autumn, and the sweet scent of a flue-cured tobacco barn.

Then there are people – bushmen with their bows and arrows in Ovamboland. The stripped divers at Monkey Island. Early Brown-shirts waving their antennae at the Brandenburger Tor. The black and the white and the brown, the hairy-heeled and the sophisticated, the hard-boiled and half-baked.

Lewis made a career as an adventurer, or, if you like, as a sensationalist, in the sense of one who pursued sensations, preferably in wild places. He took the title of his published fragment of autobiography from an early experience at a circus in Delagoa Bay. Having paid his half-crown for admission, he was dismayed to discover that he was expected to put a hand in his pocket again, to view one special attraction. Challenged, its cockney keeper responded impenitently: ‘What do you expect, gents? Dragons are extra!’ In Lewis’s life, not
much else was. His experiences would have adorned the pages of a Rider Haggard novel. He became well known in bar rooms and around campfires across southern Africa; uncomfortable without a rifle in his hand, or at least in his saddle bucket; welcoming a ‘roughhouse’; heedless of where next week’s grubstake would come from. In the second decade of the century he became briefly prominent in South African Unionist politics. When the First World War ended in 1918 Lewis, who had acquired a reputation as a public speaker, was dispatched around France to address disgruntled soldiers about their demobilisation. At one such gathering, a man called out accusingly from the crowd: ‘Aren’t you the same Lewis Hastings who murdered a man in Eloff Street during the Johannesburg diamond riots of 1913?’ Lewis, quite unabashed, called back: ‘I didn’t murder him. I broke my rifle stock over his head.’