Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable. Max Hastings
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MO and he says I’ve got a large heart, and must take a fortnight’s rest. He is seeing the colonel also. He has stopped me smoking cigarettes & alas! struck me off beer! I think it is only excessive excitement that brought it on. I’ve not told Mother.
Then on 29 September: ‘We are in a bust-up tomorrow, so I thought I’d let you know. The artillery starts today. I only told the colonel the other day I was married and he said it was a pity I had not told him before, for in case anything happened to me, it would be difficult for Elly to get a pension. I just mention this in case of events, as I know you would help to straighten it out. Give my love to dearest Mother.’ On 5 October, at Loos, the 7th Surreys’ war diary recorded laconically: ‘A [trench mortar] battery in D Coy’s trench got a severe shelling about 8am resulting in several casualties. Lt. Hastings was killed also two men and 9 others wounded.’ Aubrey was among four officers and sixty-eight men from the battalion who became fatal casualties that month. His letters reveal no lust for glory, only a deep dismay at the predicament in which he found himself. Since he was the family’s only fatal loss of the war, among three brothers who served in France, the Hastingses came off lightly. But it cannot have seemed so to Aubrey’s hapless widow.
Even as casualties rose, Basil continued to be rejected for active duty – the medical examiners categorised him B2. Mac described his father as ‘Pickwickian’. Part of this persona was that Basil, short and stout, was ill-constructed for physical exertion. Nonetheless, so desperate was the demand for men that in 1917, at the age of thirty-seven, he donned the uniform of a corporal in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It seemed absurd even to the staid spirits of the War Office that a talented writer approaching middle age should waste his time guarding some remote encampment. Thus he was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and spent the last year of the war producing a weekly newspaper for flight trainees, entitled Roosters and Fledglings. Many of its columns were taken up with recording the grisly roster of training accidents, which killed more embryo British pilots in World War I than did the Germans. Basil finished with the rank of lieutenant in the new Royal Air Force, though his commissioning letter emphasised: ‘He is clearly to understand that he is appointed for ground duties only, and in no circumstances will he be permitted to go into the air, except in connection with the actual duties of his appointment.’
Throughout the war, Basil continued to work on further plays, though West End audiences craved light entertainment. He embarked on a collaboration with the novelist and playwright Eden Phillpotts, who wrote from Torquay in January 1917:
Dear Hastings, Now I hear [H.B.] Irving has changed his mind again and may use [the stage adaptation of Phillpotts’s novel] ‘The Farmer’s Wife’. But there is something so volatile and contradictory about the actor’s mental make-up that one rather despairs. It is because the game is worth the candle – one real success worth working for – that we put time into play-writing. It’s a pure gamble of time. Drinkwater suspects that there will be a tremendous demand for plays after the war; but not khaki plays. I like your construction, but feel it won’t be worth putting the time into until we both feel we’ve got a likely proposition for [the actor-manager Gerald] du Maurier, or somebody of that sort. I’m holding ‘A Happy Finding’ and will send it in at once, when you let me know. With [Sir Charles] Hawtrey it would be bound to do well, for it is very funny, and a shrewd hit at our disgusting divorce laws. Try and get Hawtrey interested again. Yours always EP.
Mac was seven when, in 1917, he followed the usual family path to Stonyhurst’s preparatory school, Hodder. A two-horse brake carried him from Whalley station to his new abode, full of fears which were soon fulfilled. Unlike his father and grandfather, Mac possessed no piety. He found his new residence mindlessly cruel, was himself ‘unutterably miserable’, and was bullied from the moment of his arrival. When his tormentors suspended him from a ladder in the gym, the prefect who released him – at Stony-hurst masters rather than senior boys were called ‘prefects’ – slapped his face to check his tears. ‘Physical violence, so it seemed, was a way of life…I make no excuse for the bitterness of my pen,’ he wrote long afterwards. At seven especially, but likewise afterwards, he found incomprehensible the religious tracts which he was obliged to read. At confession, he was driven to invent imaginary sins. ‘The round of daily mass and prayers was hateful to me…I parroted the words, I fingered the rosary. But deep down inside, I was wondering what it was about.’
Mac achieved a brief spasm of happiness with his introduction to school theatricals, playing Morgiana the slave girl in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. But he found the brutality of the Stonyhurst system unforgivable. In that last year of the war, boys with richer parents were permitted to pay for extra food such as bacon and eggs, which Mac did not receive. Because the Jesuits censored the boys’ letters home before dispatch, it was impossible for him even to reveal his miseries. Bullying was institutionalised. Not long after his arrival, in that cold, dank, draughty, cavernous place, Mac contracted pneumonia. Their matron, ‘the hag’, shrugged her shoulders and wrote him off. A Jesuit gave him the last rites with an insouciance the memory of which disgusted the boy when he defied probability by surviving. He never forgot the readiness of his keepers to deliver him to his Maker.
At Stonyhurst, he wrote later, the Jesuits ‘devoted an unconscionable time getting us ready for the next world before we were even ready for this one’. His ‘beaks’, like most pedagogues, were poor pickers of people. Boys who achieve office in their schooldays often sink without trace thereafter, ending up as secretaries of suburban golf clubs. The qualities which commend prefects and games-players to teachers are seldom those which will prove of much value thereafter. Willingness to conform is perceived as the highest good in schoolboys, but it ill fits them for any subsequent attempt to reach the stars. School masters are also the only people on earth who claim a right to place money on horses after races have been run. Decades on, they seek to embrace former pupils who have prospered in life, however abominably they treated them in childhood. This was Mac’s experience.
While recuperating after his bout of pneumonia he was granted a respite, staying with his family at St Leonards-on-Sea for the duration of one glorious missed school term. Then he was returned to Lancashire, his father assuring him, with timeless fatuity, that modern Stonyhurst was much less harsh than it had been in his own and Lewis’s day.
Mac learned to live with the place, if never to love it. When he advanced from Hodder to the main school, and began to achieve some academic success, his life brightened. From an early stage he displayed a gift for public speaking, and always applauded the fact that the school taught Elocution as a specific skill: ‘I am best in the class at Latin, English, History by heart and all oral work,’ he wrote exuberantly in November 1918. He urged his parents to come and see him perform in the Shrovetide play, but said he realised that the expense of the journey to Lancashire would probably be prohibitive, as indeed it proved. ‘We have had two holidays because the armistice has been signed. I have learned two pieces of poetry for you when I come home, The Jackdaw of Rheims and the other King John and the Abbot of Canterbury Cathedral. I wish you would tell Daddy to send me some of his articles now, especially out of the Sunday Herald. He has made a name for himself here. I’d love to tell you more but Tempus Fugit.’ A Stonyhurst report for 1919 suggested that Douglas ‘showed distinct talent as an actor’.
Mac shared the enthusiasm of almost every Hastings schoolboy through the generations for tales of war and adventure – Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and The White Company – ‘the fights are simply ripping’ – together with all of Kipling, especially the Just So Stories. He loved the school cadet corps, and relished any opportunity to use firearms – there were no guns at home. His toys were those of his time: Meccano, model soldiers, cigarette cards. The arrival of a new Gamages’ catalogue was a big event. He was increasingly fascinated by the countryside. Roaming the fields and woods around Stonyhurst, he developed a knowledge of birds and plants remarkable in the child of a family which was anything but rustic.
His language reflected not only the period, but also a natural exuberance which persisted for most of his life. He was always ‘working like blazes’, his latest acquisition was ‘topping’, ‘ripping’, or ‘hairy’. He developed a mild interest in racing, and was extravagantly impressed by a schoolfriend whose father owned two horses. To the end, he