FROM TLS
Max Hastings and his enthusiasm for bangs
His memoir is both a ceasefire and a reminder that families are rarely safe places for children to be
Frances Wilson
Max Hastings really did shoot the television, but it was an accident waiting to happen. The Hastingses, who had a collective "enthusiasm for bangs", were the kind of family to store their rifles in the umbrella stand, and young Max was playing with a pistol during an episode of Perry Mason. His father would fondle his eighteenth-century duelling guns as other men did their mistresses, and by the time he was ten, Max too had imbibed the beauty of the barrel. "Please please when I come out", the future war reporter and military historian wrote from school, "can Daddy get lots of lovely .22 ammunition?"
This is a book about Hastings’s parents, the journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James and the broadcaster Macdonald – "Mac" – Hastings. It is subtitled a "family fable" because there is a moral attached, and because Mac was a fabulist. One of his most cherished notions was that the Hastingses, who came from Pooterish stock in South London, were descendants of "the authentic Macdonalds of Glencoe" (on trips to the Highlands, Mac’s eyes would accordingly fill with tears), and the rightful heirs to an earldom. Hastings describes his father, whom he adored, as modelling himself on figures from John Buchan or H. Rider Haggard, but in his delusions of grandeur, his idealism and his pursuit of adventure, Mac was closer to Don Quixote.
Before he became well known in the late 1950s for his Tonight reports on rural Britain, Mac was the "Special Investigator" for the boy’s magazine Eagle, a job which required him to write up his heroic experiences as a cowboy or a living firework. When, in 1960, the Hastings marriage itself became explosive, Mac refreshed himself not with a walking tour of the Lake District, but by decamping to a desert island in the Indian Ocean, equipped with nothing but a dog, a gun and a hunting knife.
Anne Scott-James, who had a lip-curling disdain for Mac’s perceived amateurism and whimsy, shared with her husband only his love of writing and lack of self-knowledge. Imagining herself a shy creature of the forest, she was seen by everyone else as a Titan of terrifying efficiency. A photograph taken when she was Women’s Editor of Picture Post shows a six-foot beauty in a man’s suit, sitting astride a bar stool with a cigarette and a glass of ale. It was Anne’s income from her years as a Fleet Street columnist that kept the family from shipwreck, and Hastings, who was raised by his nanny, waited until Anne’s death to publish this book. Mummy never, he says, "appreciated my jokes".
Hastings describes his youthful self as a "hobbledehoy – awkward, selfish and charmlessly assertive", and apologizes here to anyone who had to suffer his company, or worst of all, sleep with him. That he "lacked the gift for getting along with people", as Anne put it, was evident from an early age. When, aged five, he was taken for an interview at a pre-prep school the headmaster’s wife noted, "without admiration", that she had "never seen such a self-possessed child". His prep school headmaster observed that "his contemporaries do not like him, and they are not bad judges of character". When Winchester asked whether Hastings was the sort of boy they would wish to have, "we were obliged to tell them that you are not". So Max slouched off to Charterhouse instead, where he later noted that "boys who achieve office in their school days often sink without trace thereafter, ending up as secretaries of suburban golf clubs". He dropped out of Oxford ("nobody seemed to appreciate me and I gave them no reason for doing so"), and was saved from delinquency by a job on the Evening Standard, where he eventually became Editor.
Because they were a family "which wrote things down" in an endless flow of letters, journals, articles and books, Hastings is able to give us many examples of Anne’s sharp and steely voice and Mac’s intimate, eager lyricism. Both were great dispensers of, usually conflicting, advice. In a touching letter written to his newborn son, Mac welcomes him into a "distinguished and brilliant family" with literary genius on both sides, but warns him that nobody likes "boasters". When Hastings’s early days as a journalist were dogged by the success of his parents, Anne remarks tartly, "the way you talk we might be the Churchills". "I must give you a little paternal advice", Mac tells him in 1968; avoid clichés and remove your sunglasses when you are on television. He also advised his son to marry a girl with fat legs, because they are better in bed.
This is a surprisingly peaceful book for a man who likes battle as much as Max Hastings. He was at war with his mother for most of his life, but his narrative is shot through with regret: that he failed to appreciate the pressures Anne experienced as a mother and a career woman in the 1950s, that he blamed her for the breakdown of her marriage to Mac, that he wasn’t kinder to her new husband, Osbert Lancaster, with whom she found real happiness. Elegiac, reflective and very funny, Did You Really Shoot the Television? is both a ceasefire and a reminder that families are rarely safe places for children to be.
Max Hastings
DID YOU REALLY SHOOT THE TELEVISION?
A family fable
278pp. Harper Press. £20.
978 0 00 727171 9
Frances Wilson’s most recent book is The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, 2008. Her other books include Literary Seductions: Compulsive writers and diverted readers, 1999, and The Courtesan’s Revenge, which appeared in 2004.
His memoir is both a ceasefire and a reminder that families are rarely safe places for children to be
Frances Wilson
Max Hastings really did shoot the television, but it was an accident waiting to happen. The Hastingses, who had a collective "enthusiasm for bangs", were the kind of family to store their rifles in the umbrella stand, and young Max was playing with a pistol during an episode of Perry Mason. His father would fondle his eighteenth-century duelling guns as other men did their mistresses, and by the time he was ten, Max too had imbibed the beauty of the barrel. "Please please when I come out", the future war reporter and military historian wrote from school, "can Daddy get lots of lovely .22 ammunition?"
This is a book about Hastings’s parents, the journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James and the broadcaster Macdonald – "Mac" – Hastings. It is subtitled a "family fable" because there is a moral attached, and because Mac was a fabulist. One of his most cherished notions was that the Hastingses, who came from Pooterish stock in South London, were descendants of "the authentic Macdonalds of Glencoe" (on trips to the Highlands, Mac’s eyes would accordingly fill with tears), and the rightful heirs to an earldom. Hastings describes his father, whom he adored, as modelling himself on figures from John Buchan or H. Rider Haggard, but in his delusions of grandeur, his idealism and his pursuit of adventure, Mac was closer to Don Quixote.
Before he became well known in the late 1950s for his Tonight reports on rural Britain, Mac was the "Special Investigator" for the boy’s magazine Eagle, a job which required him to write up his heroic experiences as a cowboy or a living firework. When, in 1960, the Hastings marriage itself became explosive, Mac refreshed himself not with a walking tour of the Lake District, but by decamping to a desert island in the Indian Ocean, equipped with nothing but a dog, a gun and a hunting knife.
Anne Scott-James, who had a lip-curling disdain for Mac’s perceived amateurism and whimsy, shared with her husband only his love of writing and lack of self-knowledge. Imagining herself a shy creature of the forest, she was seen by everyone else as a Titan of terrifying efficiency. A photograph taken when she was Women’s Editor of Picture Post shows a six-foot beauty in a man’s suit, sitting astride a bar stool with a cigarette and a glass of ale. It was Anne’s income from her years as a Fleet Street columnist that kept the family from shipwreck, and Hastings, who was raised by his nanny, waited until Anne’s death to publish this book. Mummy never, he says, "appreciated my jokes".
Hastings describes his youthful self as a "hobbledehoy – awkward, selfish and charmlessly assertive", and apologizes here to anyone who had to suffer his company, or worst of all, sleep with him. That he "lacked the gift for getting along with people", as Anne put it, was evident from an early age. When, aged five, he was taken for an interview at a pre-prep school the headmaster’s wife noted, "without admiration", that she had "never seen such a self-possessed child". His prep school headmaster observed that "his contemporaries do not like him, and they are not bad judges of character". When Winchester asked whether Hastings was the sort of boy they would wish to have, "we were obliged to tell them that you are not". So Max slouched off to Charterhouse instead, where he later noted that "boys who achieve office in their school days often sink without trace thereafter, ending up as secretaries of suburban golf clubs". He dropped out of Oxford ("nobody seemed to appreciate me and I gave them no reason for doing so"), and was saved from delinquency by a job on the Evening Standard, where he eventually became Editor.
Because they were a family "which wrote things down" in an endless flow of letters, journals, articles and books, Hastings is able to give us many examples of Anne’s sharp and steely voice and Mac’s intimate, eager lyricism. Both were great dispensers of, usually conflicting, advice. In a touching letter written to his newborn son, Mac welcomes him into a "distinguished and brilliant family" with literary genius on both sides, but warns him that nobody likes "boasters". When Hastings’s early days as a journalist were dogged by the success of his parents, Anne remarks tartly, "the way you talk we might be the Churchills". "I must give you a little paternal advice", Mac tells him in 1968; avoid clichés and remove your sunglasses when you are on television. He also advised his son to marry a girl with fat legs, because they are better in bed.
This is a surprisingly peaceful book for a man who likes battle as much as Max Hastings. He was at war with his mother for most of his life, but his narrative is shot through with regret: that he failed to appreciate the pressures Anne experienced as a mother and a career woman in the 1950s, that he blamed her for the breakdown of her marriage to Mac, that he wasn’t kinder to her new husband, Osbert Lancaster, with whom she found real happiness. Elegiac, reflective and very funny, Did You Really Shoot the Television? is both a ceasefire and a reminder that families are rarely safe places for children to be.
Max Hastings
DID YOU REALLY SHOOT THE TELEVISION?
A family fable
278pp. Harper Press. £20.
978 0 00 727171 9
Frances Wilson’s most recent book is The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, 2008. Her other books include Literary Seductions: Compulsive writers and diverted readers, 1999, and The Courtesan’s Revenge, which appeared in 2004.
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