Читать книгу Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 7

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.’

Lewis argued that the disease-carrying insects of Africa fulfilled an admirable function by preserving the virginity of the vast tracts of bush he loved so much. He was irked when, in later life, he received a cool reception from the British Empire Society for his proposal, advanced not entirely in jest, to form a committee to protect the tsetse fly. In his early days as a professional hunter in Natal, he worked with two young Boers killing springbok, which in Kimberley fetched as much as a sovereign apiece for a ninety-pound carcass. He and his companions rode out to spend three days at a time pursuing the vast herds, shooting scores to be carried to market on a groaning wagon drawn by sixteen oxen. ‘To be nineteen years old,’ wrote Lewis, ‘to wake before sunrise with Halley’s Comet overhead, a rifle by one’s side, and a whole perfect day before one on the plains, that was surely very near the crown of life. It was so cold at early morning that the frost crackled beneath our feet and the rifle barrel seemed to burn one’s fingers.’

Having stalked a herd, often hundreds upon hundreds of springbok dancing across the veldt in great irregular columns, Lewis and his companions aimed to fire three, four, five shots apiece as fast as they could push bullets into the breeches of their old falling-block rifles, dropping as many beasts. Then they snatched the bridles of their ponies and set off in pursuit, racing to overtake the herd, bent low over their saddles: ‘The nearest waiting horseman goes for all he is worth, not towards the buck but across their line. Hardly checking from the gallop, he flings the reins over his horse’s neck, throws himself off, and firing from the knee, picks off one flying buck after another as the frantic multitude run, spring, and jink at close quarters…The excitement is packed into a few vivid minutes. Then it is over. The herd swings out of the danger zone.’ The hunters then retraced their trail, gathering and cleaning carcasses for the wagon.

Lewis lived long enough to see the civilised world recoil from the slaughter of African game. What men such as he did in the early years of the century came to be regarded with revulsion. The breech-loading rifle and improvements in transport enabled hunters to kill and market animals on an industrial scale, accomplishing in the first thirty years of the twentieth century an unprecedented depletion of the continent’s wildlife. In fairness to Lewis and his generation, over the ensuing eighty years habitat loss – the consequence of exploding human populations – has proved an even more fatal foe of Africa’s game than were the massacres committed by the old white hunters. But Lewis, looking back later, confessed that he regretted the wholesale killings of elephant and buffalo in which he participated so eagerly – by which, indeed, he made his living – in the years before 1914.

Around 1911, he became fired with the new craze for aviation. He formed a friendship with a man named John Weston, who brought the first aeroplane to South Africa – the usual double-kite contraption of the period, laced with piano wire and christened the ‘Weston-Farman biplane’. Lewis adored his flights with Weston: ‘The pilot occupied a flimsy sort of box open on all sides, and his passenger a kind of Madeira chair, just behind and above him. The sensation for anyone conveyed in this way, when the unwieldy machine drooped its nose earthwards, was terrific. No modern passenger can have any conception of the ecstasies of horror and rapture induced by a trip in a thing like the Weston-Farman.’ Weston the pioneer was so obsessed by the beauty of mechanical science that when a daughter was born to him, he insisted that she should be dressed in dungarees, and play only with nuts and bolts, in the hope that she might grow up into an aviatrix. In this he was disappointed, but unlike most of the early airmen, he survived to die in bed.

Weston’s plane and his own beloved Greener .303 falling-block rifle were the only examples of modern technology which Lewis enthusiastically embraced. Despite his use of firearms for hunting, he applauded the fact that the many quarrels in the Kimberley diamond diggings were settled with bare knuckles. He himself was a keen boxer, with or without gloves. In South African mining towns, he said, ‘the flourishing of guns was a mortal offence. I remember one case where a gentleman newly arrived from Western America, in the course of an argument in one of the canteens, drew a six-shooter. That was the end of him. A dozen willing hands cast him and his weapon into the muddy Vaal River. The diggings never saw him again. And yet, oddly enough, years afterwards in the Kalahari Desert during Botha’s campaign, I recognised this same American filibuster in the ranks of one of our mounted regiments. So his heart must have been in the right place, after all.’

Lewis became intimately acquainted with a host of buccaneers and freebooters such as Leander Starr Jameson of Jameson Raid notoriety, and the bandit-smuggler Scotty Smith. Far from harbouring any dislike for the Boers – the English war with them, remember, was not long finished – Lewis admired the hardy Dutch farmers. Courage and uncomplaining fortitude were the first qualities which he sought in a man, and most Afrikaners possessed them. He also warmed to black Africans, especially Khama, paramount chief of Bechuanaland – modern Botswana. Lewis was once hunting, with the chief’s permission, in remote bush five days’ march from Khama’s capital. A native runner appeared, bearing in a cleft stick a message written at the chief’s dictation by his European-trained secretary: ‘Please to take great care now on the Shoshong, for it is this month the breeding season of the black mamba.’ Lewis was enchanted by the solicitude of the old chief, who had sent a messenger a hundred miles across country with his kindly warning.

Lewis’s first body-servant and gun-bearer was a Zulu named Shakespeare, who stayed with him for years, and often entertained him with tales of his tribe’s 1879 war with the British, only a quarter of a century earlier. Shakespeare claimed that his own father had been among the party which cut down the Prince Imperial, son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III. Perceiving that the dead man was a chief of some importance, Shakespeare asserted that, in accordance with tribal custom, his killers extracted and shared a mouthful apiece of the Prince’s raw heart. Lewis believed this story to be true. It left him puzzled about what might therefore repose in the casket supposedly containing the boy’s heart which had been returned by Lord Chelmsford with much ceremony to his grieving mother, Empress Eugénie, in Surrey.

Lewis loved the legends of the African tribes, of which he often included samples in his own anecdotage. But in his attitude to the continent’s indigenous peoples, he was a man of his time. ‘A lot of nonsense is talked about the yearning for freedom of this and freedom of that,’ he observed characteristically. ‘The only freedom Africans want is freedom from trousers.’ That line appeared for years in a dictionary of quotations, until a squeamish modern editor deleted it. Lewis loved to meet Africans in what he perceived as their natural setting – villages amid the vast expanse of the bush. He was moved to pity when he saw them in the towns of South Africa and Rhodesia, where they seemed to him to shrink and become lost souls.

In the last years before the First World War, Lewis devoted increasing energy to journalism and politics, to which he was introduced by the ex-Jameson raider turned financial magnate Sir George Farrar. Farrar persuaded Lewis to help organise the Unionist Party in the Transvaal. He worked closely with two former members of the ‘Milner Kindergarten’, Patrick Duncan and Richard Feetham. In July 1913, in their company Lewis played a dramatic part in suppressing the huge, violent miners’ strikes which convulsed South Africa. Thousands of rioters, many of them armed, converged on Johannesburg. Lewis, though the youngest man in the Rand Club that day, found himself called upon to command a local ‘Civic Guard’. This was the occasion when he broke a Mauser rifle over the head of a man whom he saw raising a gun to fire at his company. Lewis cheerfully admitted afterwards that he held no special opinion one way or another about the merits of the authorities’ case, or that of the strikers. He merely took his usual view that if there was a fight, he wanted to be in it. Botha and Smuts suppressed the rioters by promising generous concessions, none of which were fulfilled. A few months later, Lewis found himself with a real war to fight, on a scale which satisfied even his own gluttony for trouble.

I was brought up to idolise Lewis, as my father did. Even in old age, he retained his magical speaking voice. He presented a magnificent tawny figure, about whom no legend could be doubted. He was entirely of his time and place. A sceptic would have said that his life was selfish and reckless. Most of his virtues were those of the Clubland Heroes of fiction, founded upon courage, physical prowess, a boundless appetite for excitement and fellowship. His views and prejudices lacked any shading: somebody was a white man, or a rotter; a cause was worthless, or to die for. Yet Lewis possessed real literary gifts, not least a talent for verse. When he exercised his brain and pen, the results were sometimes remarkable. His accomplishments were much slighter than they might have been, because he always chose to please himself, to forswear discipline, to pursue whatever overhead star momentarily seized his imagination.

To my father and later myself, when we read of the Hastingses of the nineteenth century, they seemed respectable, hard-working, decent Christian people. But glamour and romance were lacking from their lives. Lewis, by contrast, towered over every room he entered. Even in old age, in any company he looked willing as well as able to knock down any man who deserved it. Like so many black, or at least grey, sheep he was much more fun than the chaps who got made head of house at school or lived blameless lives in – well, Trinity Square, Borough, where the Tribe grew up. And by 1914, the fun in Lewis’s life had hardly started.