Did You Really Shoot the Television? (13 page)

I have often reread that letter over the past forty years, and of course it has given me huge pleasure. In many ways, during the decades which followed, its author was a careless father – careless in that, like so many parents, he enjoyed the idea of having children more than the reality, beyond short spasms. But all of us love records of our own heritage. I soon realised my luck in coming from a family which wrote things down. I have often wondered whether Father would have displayed the sensitivity to withhold that letter from me if, as was more than likely, I had disappointed his passionate hope

– resembling that of a racehorse breeder who couples two sprinters
in search of a Derby winner – that as the son of two writers I would become a writer myself. As it was, of course, at twenty-one I was indeed scraping a living in Grub Street, and thrilled to the knowledge that I had embarked on a path which Father so much wanted for me.

I was christened in the tiny Norman church a stone’s throw from Rose Cottage, surrounded at the font by its wonderful twelfth-century knightly effigies, the ‘Aldworth giants’. My baptism into the Church of England signalled my father’s absolute break with the Catholicism of his own childhood, and indeed with my family’s faith as far back as it is recorded. A cynic would say that for both Mac and Anne the christening was a social rather than a religious occasion, as it is for most of the English middle class. Neither, I think, espoused any spiritual belief with conviction.

A woman friend of mine, long afterwards eyeing the photographs of my mother holding me outside the church porch, observed laconically: ‘You can see that she’s not very comfortable holding a baby.’ As Nancy Mitford wrote of Aunt Sadie in
The Pursuit of Love
, one could sense the presence of Nanny lurking just out of shot, ready to take back the bundle as soon as the photographs were over. Ruth Pallant, Father’s old girlfriend who became my godmother, presented me with a handsome set of ivory-backed brushes, a last flourish of generosity before her cash ran out, she bolted from husband Bertie and married a handsome but impecunious brigadier. My other godmother was Eileen Dickson, a journalistic colleague of Anne’s who by chance also lived in Aldworth. Eileen later succeeded my mother as editor of
Harper’s
, but like most godparents soon faded from our lives.

My parents had already embarked upon a domestic routine which persisted through the years that followed. Weekdays were spent in London, where I became a child of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. We soon moved from Swan Court to a larger flat in Rutland Gate, just beside the parks, possessed of the day and night nurseries then deemed indispensable to respectable infanthood. On Friday
evenings we crowded into the family Austin for a car-sick two-hour ride to west Berkshire, past the perpetually diving neon-lit lady atop the Jantzen swimwear factory in Hounslow, with a pit stop at a roadhouse (wonderfully ’thirties word, that) named Sidney Foster’s outside Maidenhead. At Aldworth, more or less blissful weekends were spent until the time came to return to London, amid sobbings from me which increased in volume with the passage of years.

I loved the country, and the almost unlimited scope for troublemaking it offered, while finding London life pretty dreary, as indeed it was in those immediate post-war years. The urban landscape seemed dominated by bombsites – a yawning vacancy of rubble and weeds stood immediately beside 41 Rutland Gate. There was little to buy in the shops. In Harrods’ toy department I peered covetously at the glass cases containing serried ranks of lead soldiers, each surmounted by a printed notice warning that its contents were ‘FOR EXPORT ONLY’. It seemed to me that I had missed all the fun of being around during the war, such as Father, Lewis and Stephen had experienced and reminisced so enthusiastically about, while arriving in time to endure rationing, cold and austerity.

Some aspects of London life in the late 1940s would have been more familiar to an Edwardian child than to a twenty-first-century one. Milk was delivered daily by a horse-drawn float, coal dumped in pavement manholes by grimy heavers attired in the manner of Shaw’s Alfred Doolittle, with sacks serving as headgear. A gas-lighter with a long pole patrolled the streets each evening, igniting the lamps by a feat of legerdemain which never ceased to delight me. Uniforms were still ubiquitous, both khaki and full-dress, especially where we lived, in exciting proximity to Knightsbridge Barracks. The wares of the jolly fishmonger opposite Harrods were laid out on a great white open slab, and he himself was adorned in striped apron and straw hat. At Christmas, the Edwardian melodrama
Where the Rainbow Ends
, in which St George saves children enslaved by the evil dragon, played to packed houses including my enraptured self. From an early age I walked through Kensington, and likewise the lanes of west Berkshire, alone and without fear. Child molesters and muggers were unthought of.

The parks’ congregation of nannies formed the hub of upper-middle-class social life. Invitations to the round of little tea parties in Montpelier Square, Hans Place and Victoria Road were arranged between respective children’s custodians, rather than through parents, on the benches beside Rotten Row, or at Miss Ballantine’s famous dancing classes for posh toddlers in the Brompton Road, at which I was an exceptionally undistinguished pupil. Mac and Anne’s social circle focused on fellow journalists and the rag trade. It was Nanny who, for a limited season, propelled me up the social ladder into the world of get-togethers at the Hyde Park Hotel with little gold chairs and pass-the-parcel; conjurers and dainty sardine sandwiches; sailing boats on the Round Pond; ‘tiddlers’ – sticklebacks – brought home in jamjars and preserved until their smelly expiry; relentless tours of the Kensington museums.

Like almost every child of my time and class, I adored Nanny. She came to us when I was six weeks old and stayed for eighteen years, through good times and bad. Her name was Jessie Strafford, and she was already approaching sixty when she signed on. One of eight children of the timekeeper at a Sheffield steelworks, she was Yorkshire through and through, unfailingly clad in grey overalls and sensible
round blue felt hat. A comfortably heavy figure, she possessed what Anne described as ‘that flat-footed pram-pusher’s stance’. She was ‘square of figure and a doughty trencherwoman’. Nanny was much grander than the Hastingses, as she was not beyond reminding us from time to time. One of her brothers was a master cutler, in those days a proud profession. She once presented my father with a carving knife of his making, and thereafter it became unthinkable to attack the joint with anything but ‘Nanny’s knife’. She had found a vocation looking after children, as strong as any which guided others into the Church. She did not like all children – indeed, was balefully sceptical of most: ‘That little Henry Johnson doesn’t seem very sharp, does he?’; ‘I wonder if young Pamela Croome will grow any bigger, madam?’

‘Heavens, Nanny, what a sinister idea. Why ever shouldn’t she? She’s only eight months old, isn’t she?’

‘
Nine
months, madam. And hasn’t put on an ounce for eleven weeks. I should be
very
worried if I were Lady Croome.’

Nanny’s affection and enthusiasm were engaged only by her own charges, to whom she was single-mindedly devoted. There had been very few of these. When she joined a family, she stayed until the children were old enough to enter Sandhurst, ‘come out’ or take over the estate. She was a true imperialist, who after starting ‘in service’ as a nurserymaid at the age of fourteen had laboured for years under broiling sun in India and Ceylon with an Indian Army colonel; in Kenya under a governor-general; in Trinidad, the West Indies, Egypt and like outposts of British might with other proconsular dignitaries. Her conversation was studded with timeless nursery clichés: ‘Who got out of bed the wrong side this morning?…A stitch in time saves nine…There’s no tea for Mr Crosspatch…Has the cat got your tongue?…That road only goes to Timbuctoo…Eat your toast crusts and make your hair curl…Wear clean underwear – you might get run over…There’s no such word as “can’t”.’ She was a fount of stories about the inadequacies of black servants, tiresome domestic intrusions of zebras, perils of drink, sterling qualities of the Tommy. At bathtime she regaled me with snatches of old
music-hall songs, almost invariably imperialistic: ‘Goodbye Dolly, I must leave you, though it breaks my heart to go…’

When Mac committed some social crime, Nanny would drop a prim remark which emphasised how far down in the world she found herself, amid the Hastings household: ‘Sir Edward’ – her former employer in Kenya – ‘was buried at sea off the
Ajax
.’ The unspoken corollary was that Father’s remains, far from attaining the glories of submersion from a cruiser of the Royal Navy, would be fortunate to secure disposal from a tramp steamer. Nanny’s decades of service in official residences imbued her with a natural authority which won the deference of the park sisterhood. Whatever the deficiencies of the Hastings family’s pedigree, housing arrangements and bank accounts, her eminence secured brevet promotion for me, and later my sister, with consequent access to Kensington and Chelsea parties, birthday Punch-and-Judys, sticky cakes and musical chairs. My first girlfriend, met at Miss Ballantine’s when I was four, possessed the unsurpassable name of Merelina Ponsonby.

Rather than of my parents, almost all my memories of early childhood are of Nanny, who never took days off and seldom holidays. Father’s appearances were most readily identified with the presents
he brought home from far-flung places: an authentic cowboy outfit from America; model soldiers which he showed me how to array into a British fighting square; toy guns of many shapes and sizes; smelly Bedouin robes from Jordan; the mounted hoof of a bison he had shot in India; a Norwegian model of the balsa raft
Kon-Tiki
, in which Thor Heyerdahl had recently crossed the Pacific, and which Father himself constructed with extraordinary dexterity from a kit of logs and string. For the most part, however, he was more frequently observed going than coming: to shoots and fishing expeditions, assignments abroad, his beloved Savage Club.

How I yearned to accompany him on these trips, and how romantic he made even the most commonplace destinations sound! When he spoke portentously of taking ‘the Great West Road’ and ‘the Bath Road’ to Berkshire, the journey seemed vastly more promising than a mere drive down the dreary old A4. He represented the Highlands of Scotland, by no means mistakenly, as an earthly paradise to which good Englishmen were admitted at intervals equipped with rod and gun, as a reward for exceptional merit. From my earliest years he seemed possessed of superhuman powers to make exciting things happen. It was in his gift to provide stars’ autographs, fix meetings with comedians, privileged backstage visits to the circus. I did not then grasp that these are the sort of petty perks made available to journalists to compensate for lack of more substantial power and rewards. When once we took the Golden Arrow to Dover, en route for the Côte d’Azur, I threw a shocking scene because my request to travel on the engine footplate was denied. It seemed likewise monstrous that, when we saw Len Hutton lunching at a nearby table in the Oval restaurant during a match, Father admitted that he lacked the acquaintance necessary to introduce me to the great cricketer. I had taken it for granted that if Father chose to command a boon, it would be conferred. At a time when Sir Jimmy Savile was still a Bevin Boy, for me Mac, during his spasmodic lunges into playing the good parent, conducted a perpetual
Jim’ll Fix It
.

Once in a while, he took me to watch him broadcast from the BBC’s studios in Portland Place. I stood with face pressed against
the glass wall of the control room, peering at his elegantly suited figure, addressing the microphone in impeccably modulated tones. Mac attributed his beautiful speaking voice to the Jesuits’ training in Rhetoric, for which he had won prizes at Stonyhurst. It is surely true that all schoolchildren should be taught to speak, just as they are taught to write. The gift of self-expression is priceless. Even in casual conversation, and even when he was talking nonsense, Mac’s diction commanded as much admiration as his tailoring.

From my earliest days, I was captivated by his gifts as a raconteur. There were lots of war stories, of course, told with the gusto which he brought to all his memories of 1939–45: how Monty stood by the dusty roadside in Normandy in August 1944, urging his armoured columns, ‘On to the kill!’; how cocky captured German officers could be cut down to size by removing their jackboots; how he once ate a dog when rations were short. There were shooting yarns, fishing anecdotes, tales of journeys on the transatlantic
Queen
s, of London restaurants and wartime bivouacs. It seemed to me a miracle of social alpinism that he was invited to the annual London Christmas lunch of Bertram Mills’s circus. He represented the model I yearned to emulate.

I swallowed some of his prejudices only temporarily, but adopted others for life – for instance, a suspicion of beards and bow ties, a loathing for cats and football, which he declared to be played by brutes for the amusement of other brutes. He told me that team activities were mere games, while anything worthy to be dignified as sport must involve individual exertion – shooting, fishing, riding and suchlike. The unworthy thought did not then dawn on me that the Hastings distaste for ball games is rooted in our gross incompetence at them.

Father’s life seemed the pattern of what I wanted for myself, so that as soon as I started to buy my own clothes, I dressed in imitation of him. When I was old enough to choose my own holidays, I hastened to destinations which he loved, mostly Scottish. When I wanted to test myself against physical danger, which he persuaded me that every right-thinking Englishman should do, I addressed the same perils he had confronted, regretting only that the Germans
were unavailable (temporarily, anyway) to play their usual forty-five minutes each way on the other side.

In only one respect did his personal record disappoint me. From an early age, I was an eager and somewhat credulous reader of P.G. Wodehouse, whose works formed my image of how young English gentlemen comported themselves. One day I asked Father how many times he had spent the night in chokey after, say, stealing a policeman’s helmet or being discovered dancing in the fountains of Trafalgar Square. He assured me with some asperity that he had never served even an hour behind prison bars. This was a blow to my image of him as a man-about-town, a role which in all other respects he seemed to fill with assurance.