Читать книгу Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 10

My mother disliked her own family considerably. No photographs of them were visible in any house in which we later lived. She spoke dismissively of their professional doings, and recalled with distaste the oppressive atmosphere in their home. Born in 1913, she was ‘frightened of my parents, and grew up too soon for Dr Spock. I caught the tail-end of the Victorian philosophy that parents were perfect, and children always in the wrong, a righteous target for round-the-clock criticism. This made me very shy in company.’ Her paternal grandfather was a Congregationalist minister, a heavy, bearded Victorian, named Rev. John Scott-James, who presided over a church in Stratford-on-Avon and somehow contrived to educate eight children with the aid of scholarships. One such enabled my own grandfather, Rolfe, born in 1880, to attend Mill Hill school and then read classics at Brasenose, Oxford. Most of his sisters spent their later lives as spinster teachers in far-flung corners of the world. One, like her Hastings contemporary, became a nun.