Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable. Max Hastings
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He said nothing of his father’s spiritual torments and worldly disappointments. Basil merely rejoiced in an early life full of incident, in which a modest income somehow sufficed to provide fun as well as education. I first read his narrative when I was twelve, and it inspired me with a sense of heredity which is usually the privilege of grander dynasties.
Probably because Edward’s financial circumstances made close budgeting essential, as well as because he possessed a meticulous temperament, he commissioned custom-printed account books. In these, he recorded every detail of expenditure on behalf of each member of the ever-expanding Tribe. Ethel, his first child, arrived in 1879; Lewis, the eldest son – named for Leyson Lewis, the family benefactor who provided Edward with his vital allowance – in the following year; my grandfather Basil in 1881. Thereafter babies, all born at home, followed in a profusion that must have gladdened the heart of the family priest. Like Dickens’s much-put-upon clerk, ‘the Cherub’ Reginald Wilfer of Our Mutual Friend, Edward had a ‘limited income and an unlimited family’. The account books eventually contained separate pages for:
Hastings Mrs E
Hastings Ethelreda Agatha Gordon
Hastings Lewis Macdonald
Hastings Basil Macdonald
Hastings Gladys Mary Fraser
Hastings Beryl
Angela Macdonald
Hastings Claude Hugh
Hastings Aubrey Joseph
Hastings Everard Ignatius
Hastings Eulalia Emily Macdonald
Hastings Muriel Magdalen
Hastings Rene Francis
In 1890 the family’s annual income was £416, of which household costs consumed £200, rent a further £70, an annual holiday £17.11s.3d. Edward recorded expenditure upon himself of £6.2s.0d on clothes; 2s on hair cutting; £11.0s.6d on lunches; £3.12s.0d on travel. In 1901, the last year for which the account books survive, his salary was just £312.10s.6d, the family’s expenditure £319.17s.5d. This included seventeen tons of coal at £22.10s.6d; lunches at £6.2s.6d; £10 on a holiday; £6.2s.0d for clothing; one penny for a diary; half a crown for postage; £20 for Elizabeth; £3 or £4 apiece on the children, including 3s.5d for dress-lining for Beryl, and 2s.4d for Claude’s sand shoes. There were also assorted halfpennies for orphanages and the destitute; a few pennies apiece to the church choir, school treats and various Catholic charities. Edward bought one suit a year, collarless to save on the expense of ties. He paid £10 in income tax.
He was obsessed with keeping records, a habit honed by thirty years in a solicitors’ office, and he made his children follow suit. From their earliest years, transgressions were minuted. They were required to make formal confessions or promises of future good behaviour, like this one signed by Lewis:
I Lewis Macdonald Hastings do hereby pledge myself to my father as under
1. not to buy on credit
2. not to apply again to my father for a loan
3. to repay present loan of £2.5.0 by weekly instalments of 5/
4. I represent to my father that I want the present loan to repay R. Gray for a liability they have incurred on my behalf for a suit of clothes
5. to buy myself a nightshirt.
Basil suffered similar embarrassments, which he was also obliged to confess. Edward debated his own dilemmas in writing, as in this memorandum to himself, dated 2 May 1901: ‘Question: whether having power either to send Claude and Aubrey to Stony-hurst or to Wimbledon we ought to exercise that power in favour of Stonyhurst when the consequences will be that Muriel cannot be sent to school till she is 16.’ Stonyhurst’s fees were £14.18s.5d a year, plus £2.8s.6d clothing allowance. Edward considered, and rejected, a notion that if he borrowed money, Muriel might be sent away to school at fifteen. Instead, he made minute calculations about the cost of journeys to Lancashire. He concluded that a few pence could be saved by ensuring that the boys always took the college trap from the nearby station at Whalley. It was decided that Claude and Aubrey should indeed be sent to Stonyhurst, ‘using portmanteaux bought for Basil and Lewis’.
Edward’s children lived in awe of their father, perceiving his profound commitment to conducting life as religion taught. Basil wrote later of his father’s ‘nobility’, his behaviour as ‘an example of light and guidance’. Edward kept a secret journal in Greek characters, in which he described strivings with his own conscience which became more pronounced and indeed tortured as he grew older. He scarcely ever lost his temper. Once, after displaying anger to their maid, in the midst of the following Sunday lunch he summoned the girl and apologised in front of his children. Basil described him: ‘Silent, always apart, he passed through the world shunning company, afraid that he might become too attached to temporal things.’
A priest who was a family friend described him as ‘the ideal Catholic layman’. Basil said: ‘You cannot write down how people are good. You just know it and cannot get away from it. I don’t think any of us remember his ever doing anything or buying anything for himself. He just worked and worked and prayed and prayed. Sometimes, the mater would buy him a packet of cigarettes and he would smoke one each evening. I think he was a little ashamed of that luxury.’ Each night, Edward blessed each of his children before they went to bed. In May there was always an altar to Our Lady on the staircase, before which the family gathered for prayers. Even by the standards of the Victorian era, the severity of the regime which Edward imposed upon himself seems flagellatory.
Yet nobody could exercise effective control over eleven children once their father disappeared to his office. Basil wrote: ‘Our garden was enormous, actually hedges and a mulberry tree. The hedges were absolutely right for ambuscades and sitting behind to eat all your sweets if you didn’t want to give any away. Once the garden was all dug up into trenches in the most perfect manner (in connection with the drains) and the kids played at the Boer War, which was on at the time…They must have done it pretty well because we had a genuine Spion Kop where all the garden refuse had been piled up.’
When it rained, the back garden became swamped. Two French boys named Louis and Albert were then summoned from next door to re-enact the battle of Trafalgar. Lewis played Nelson, of course, though Basil as Hardy refused to kiss him. The Tribe were bemused by Louis and Albert’s ready acquiescence in defeat, but in those days the French seemed resigned from birth to English superiority. On other days the children enacted the battle of Lake Regillus, or put planks across the garden inundation and played Horatius holding the bridge across the Tiber. The Pater made them learn reams of Macaulay by heart, and they put the knowledge to good use. Lewis acted Horatius. Small members of the Tribe served as Tarquins, who fell in the swamp after being stabbed, ‘so that we were usually dragged in to tea and dripping instead of butter’.
Their father, ever the legal pedant, conducted ‘trials’ to mete out justice for his children’s outrages against each other, at which evidence was solemnly taken, witnesses cross-examined. Edward then pronounced a verdict, typically: ‘No jury could convict on such conflicting evidence. Case dismissed. Parties to kiss each other.’ Basil wrote: ‘That was the sort of trick the pater usually played on us. When we were all dead tired he’d stop the case and make us kiss when we’d much rather have been thrashed. It’s bad enough to have to kiss your sister, or any girl, but a brother – pah!’
The girls and boys fought each other relentlessly. Whenever it was the Mater’s day to go to the Stores, and Edward was safely absent at his office, there was a war. This might be started by Lewis snatching a book from Ethel, or Ethel making a sneering reference to the colour of Basil’s hair. Once hostilities had been joined, the girls flew to entrench themselves in their room, usually accompanied by a hostage, perhaps baby Everard.
In the ensuing siege, pepper might be squeezed through the keyhole, smelly chemicals pushed under the sill, the lock smashed with