Did You Really Shoot the Television? (16 page)

Most favoured of all by Mac was the Thursday Club, whose
thirty-odd members met each week in a private room on the top floor of his favourite London restaurant, Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street. Its principal luminaries were actors Peter Ustinov and James Robertson Justice,
Daily Express
editor Arthur Christiansen, Larry Adler, Baron the fashionable photographer, the Marquess of Milford Haven and, not infrequently, Prince Philip. Lurid gossip-column speculation surrounded the Thursday Club’s gatherings, because of its royal connection. In truth, I fancy that its chief extravagance was drunkenness on a scale that would have impressed Evelyn Waugh. The company seldom broke up before four or five, and provided Father for days afterwards with exotic anecdotage, on which I was an avid eavesdropper. The club was subsidised by Bernard Walsh, Wheeler’s genial proprietor, who presided annually over a gala spring meeting at Colchester, to greet the arrival of the new season’s oysters. It eventually collapsed in the 1970s, by which time its most prominent members had either resigned – like Prince Philip – or died. Even the open-handed Bernard became weary of tolerating the unpaid bills of the surviving hangers-on. I was entered for membership at birth, but attended only a couple of meetings as a teenage guest.

Mac forged a self-image as the gentleman journalist, in the maintenance of which no vulgar monetary consideration was permitted to interfere. His suits came in profusion from John Walls of Savile Row. There were shoes and boots from Codners to fit every venue from the ballroom to the hunting field, though he hated dancing and rode to hounds only a dozen times in his life. There were lots of guns, about which more later, together with fitted cartridge magazines and bags, shooting brogues, silver sandwich-cases, saddlery, leather luggage, swordsticks. A passing introduction to some activity investigated on behalf of
Eagle
often induced Mac to equip himself as a practitioner in a fashion that would have impressed Mr Toad. Jammed into cupboards in London and Berkshire were archers’ bows and arrows, falconers’ hoods and gauntlets, ferreters’ nets and lines, lassos and cowboy chaps, driving whips and top hats. Most of these accessories were used or worn but once, until I got my sticky and unauthorised little fingers on them.

Mac seldom received invitations to shoot or fish for free, because he numbered few landed grandees among his acquaintance. But he paid for his share of an occasional grouse day or salmon week, and dined out off the memories for months afterwards. Indeed, he talked so much about his sporting experiences that for years I cherished a delusion that he filled his diary with weekends at great houses and on famous rivers. In a school essay on ‘The Ideal Parent’, I wrote at ten: ‘Nearly all parents enjoy sport and often take their lunch and go shooting on the Downs or fish if they can. Some are not lucky enough to be able to do this, as they live in town and can seldom get a day off in the country. Some cannot afford train journeys and if they have not got a car have to stay in London.’ Only much later did I understand that the reality of Father’s sporting life was much more modest than I had supposed, and contributed grievously to his overdraft.

In 1953, when I first departed sobbing towards boarding school – in my case, a football-fixated punishment camp near Newbury named Horris Hill – Father initiated a custom which he maintained through the years which followed. On the first day of term, before we left for the station he took me to lunch, occasionally accompanied by my mother, at one of his favourite London restaurants. We started with the Caprice, then as now in Arlington Street, but incomparably plusher in its ’fifties guise. Father introduced me, aged eight, to the head waiter, solemnly assuring me that Mario would become one of the most important people in my life. He pointed out David Niven, Noël Coward and other stars at neighbouring tables. None of this spoiling treatment prevented me from bursting into tears when confronted by a sorbet in place of the ice cream I had ordered. I recognised an attempt to bribe me into acquiescence about boarding the grimy school puffer at Paddington, and was not to be suborned out of richly justified sulks.

On subsequent last days before incarceration, we ate fish at Wheeler’s; beef from the trolley at Simpson’s in the Strand; smoked salmon at the Savoy; lamb at the Ivy, where Father pointed out all manner of writers and publishers whose names meant nothing to me. The gastronomic round had two consequences. First, in
conjunction with the rest of Father’s programme of conspicuous consumption, it convinced me that we must be pretty rich, a delusion which went uncorrected until I was sixteen or seventeen. Second, and more usefully, it supplied motivation. I became imbued with determination that as an adult I would enjoy the same standard of living, whatever drastic measures were needed to achieve it.

When Father, in conversation, wove a pattern of dreams for my future, such an outcome was taken for granted. He talked with unflinching assurance about ‘when you play your first salmon…when you find yourself standing in a grouse butt in a gale…when you join the Beefsteak…when you’re taking an open ditch in Leicestershire’. He cautioned me about the etiquette of never signing my name in any book which I might give as a gift, until I could do so as its author. He introduced me to tailors, bootmakers and head waiters as a future customer, to editors and publishers as a prospective contributor. He provided in ample measure what every child seeks most passionately from a parent – complete belief. My mother by contrast, incomparably more realistic, made plain her fear that I was born to be hanged. From an early age she treated me in the same fashion as did my schoolmasters: as a habitual criminal rashly granted probation, but certain soon to reoffend. The evidence was on her side. She loved me sure enough, but in her determination not to succumb to foolish delusions, she expected the worst and usually got it. Father, however, even without benefit of a couple of drinks, and more vigorously thereafter, prophesied: ‘You’ll end up as Sir Max Hastings, editing a national newspaper and writing better books than I’ve done.’ The tears come even now, at the memory.

In 1951 Anne resigned the editorship of
Harper’s
, partly to have another baby – my sister Clare, born later that year – and partly to write
In the Mink
, a professed novel, in truth a memoir, about her experience of the fashion business. There is a chapter in it entitled ‘Nanny’, which represented one of Anne’s wittiest and most observant feats of portraiture. Unfortunately, however, it depicted Miss Strafford with withering condescension: ‘Her mind was a pinhead,
her world the smallest imaginable. But she was complete master of it, placid, appreciated, content.’ Anne never contemplated the impact her words would have on the park sorority, who read and debated them avidly. ‘Nanny Johnson says I ought to sue Mrs Hastings,’ Nanny Hastings – nannies always referred to each other by the names of their employers, not their own – told me in high dudgeon, pursing her finely moustached lips. I do not think she ever thereafter liked my mother. But she had become too deeply rooted in our household, and perhaps also felt herself too old, conveniently to decamp. She swallowed her employer’s casual dollop of contempt.

In the Mink
was well received. A year or two later Sandy Wilson, then at the height of his fame as author of the West End hit
The Boy Friend
, tried to turn the book into a stage musical, though it was never performed. Anne found herself increasingly in demand as a newspaper contributor. Early in 1953 the
Sunday Express
asked her at short notice to write an article on Queen Mary, who had just died. Harold Keeble, the paper’s editor, liked it so much that he invited her to become a regular columnist. Each week thereafter, she filled ‘the Anne Scott-James Page’, which was about anything she chose – fashion, politics, topical controversy. At the outset she was not lavishly paid – £3,000 a year – but this was doubled after eighteen months, when she began receiving generous offers from rivals. ‘I cannot overstress the pleasure of being a star writer on a successful newspaper,’ she wrote. ‘The Beaverbrook Press in those days when Lord Beaverbrook himself was still alive and a hyperactive proprietor, had a mystique which impressed all journalists except those who could not stomach Beaverbrook’s mischievous – but to my mind harmless, because lunatic – politics.’

She came to love Harold Keeble, one of her best mentors: brilliant, creative, witty, mendacious, treacherous. Dispatching her to, say, Rome, he would announce reassuringly that he had briefed the paper’s local correspondent: ‘I’ve told Tom to give you all his time in Rome and to meet you with a car and cash.’ More likely, she well knew, Keeble had told ‘Tom’: ‘Don’t let Anne bother you when she comes out.’ After some shameless piece of back-stabbing, she said to
Anne Edwards, her opposite number at the
Daily Express
: ‘If I saw Harold drowning in a pond and I had a pole, I wouldn’t fish him out.’ Anne Edwards said: ‘I’d push him under.’ My mother learned, as all journalists must, to shrug off the double-dealing as part of the game, and enjoy the ride. ‘Harold made life so entertaining that I looked forward to every day in the office,’ she said. She loved the challenges of last-minute deadlines, pages torn up and rewritten at lightning speed.

Beaverbrook’s titles were rich at that time, possessed of huge resources and facilities. Their names sufficed to open almost every door, to persuade the most implausible people to accept calls. Later, Anne found ‘the non-stop turmoil’ of the
Daily Express
too much of a good thing. But she loved her time on the
Sunday
, and later on the
Sunday Dispatch
, sister paper of the
Daily Mail
, to which she moved for the usual reasons – more money and intense dislike of the reptilian John Junor, who succeeded to the
Express
editorship when Harold Keeble was fired. Always meticulous, she checked every comma of her copy, which meant lingering in Fleet Street – this was the period when she forsook forty years of water-drinking – until 10 o’clock on Friday nights. She recalled one oddity of this period – the only lesbian proposal she ever received, from the
Daily Express
star writer Nancy Spain. Miss Spain took Anne for what was supposedly a ‘get to know you’ lunch at Wheeler’s. To the unconcealed mirth of waiters, the hostess proved unable to keep her hands off her guest, who was more bewildered than cross.

Anne became, in those years, one of the most celebrated woman journalists in Fleet Street, combining acerbic wit with a brilliant eye for fashions – not merely the couture kind – and for controversy. I was not the only one in whom she inspired fear as well as respect. She was formidable, sometimes unyielding, not above tantrums. ‘You see this trench in my shoulder?’ Harold Keeble said to me years later. ‘It was made by your mother crying on it.’ There were many evenings when I sat in a dressing gown before bed, playing with my soldiers in a corner of our sitting room, listening avidly to my parents exchanging Fleet Street gossip. El Vino’s wine bar, the Savoy Grill
and the Cheshire Cheese became imbued in my eyes with infinite romance. Mac and Anne mercilessly dissected editors and executives, retailed their jokes and follies. My mother said with deep conviction: ‘Never listen to anyone who says what a wonderful character Max Beaverbrook was. He may have been a newspaper genius, but he was a horrible, horrible man.’

In the eyes of the media world, Mac and Anne were a glamour couple, sharing success. Yet the divide between them continued to widen. Mac was an essayist with a feather-light touch, and a superb descriptive writer. However, his views on any serious subject – politics, the arts, world affairs – were those of a retired cavalry colonel. Like Dr Johnson without the sagacity, he was ‘a true-born Englishman, and fully prejudiced against all other nations’. He and Uncle Lewis agreed that Africa south of the Zambezi would always remain white-dominated. He regarded Americans with disdain, and relished the Thursday Club convention whereby transatlantic guests were obliged to write ‘lost colonial’ after their names in its book. He believed passionately in the superiority of all things English to those of anywhere else.

Although he read widely, his favourites were comfortable home-grown middlebrow writers – Dickens, Cobbett, W.H. Hudson, Kipling. He had no patience with Jane Austen; had never, I think, read George Eliot, and certainly not Proust; found Hardy unacceptably bleak. More surprisingly, I never recall him speaking of Trollope. He loathed opera and ballet, and though a discerning judge of a photograph or drawing, took little interest in paintings and none in music. He professed an enthusiasm for gardening, but seldom himself wielded a trowel. Though he loved animals, his own record as a pet-owner was uniformly disastrous. His knowledge of the countryside, of trees and birds, was considerable, but most of his enthusiasms were philistine. His literary gifts and eye for whimsy were not matched by judgement. Anne said in old age: ‘Your father wrote brilliantly on slight subjects, but the more serious the issue, the less sensible his view of it.’

She was a lot cleverer. It was irksome for her to be denied the pleasures of music, unless a friend invited her to Covent Garden. She found
it hard to drag Mac to the theatre for anything more demanding than a Noël Coward play or
My Fair Lady
. Her more cultured acquaintances quickly wearied of Mac’s sporting stories, his serenely confident and usually wildly mistaken political forecasts. Anne afterwards claimed that the moment when she realised she could not indefinitely endure Mac’s society came in 1956, during the Suez crisis. ‘Your father proclaimed: “In a decade, people will see that Eden is as great a man as Churchill,”’ she recalled with infinite disgust.

Impatient of perceived folly or inadequacy in the world at large, Anne was unlikely to tolerate it indefinitely in a husband. If she had met Tolstoy, she could well have told him that his books would be improved by judicious pruning. Had she encountered Winston Churchill at a dinner party in the 1950s, before pudding came she might have suggested that he would have best served his own reputation by retiring from politics at the end of the war. It was not that her observations and judgements were foolish – until the day she died, they remained acutely penetrating. But they were of a severity which caused victims, not least members of the family, to quail before her tongue.