Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable. Max Hastings

faded. Less usefully, he also imbued him with some of his own contempt for the practical issues of life, solvency among them. Lewis’s values were those of Buchan and Sapper, which were starting to seem dated even in the 1930s. He never made the most of his considerable talents, because chronic restlessness caused him to go walkabout before finishing anything he started.

      The most notable influence on Mac’s life, in the last phase before war came, was a woman. He struck up a friendship with a successful gentleman dentist named Bertie Pallant, who continued to practise despite having a country estate and considerable fortune. Bertie eventually squandered his money in a series of increasingly fanciful investments, but in those days plenty of cash remained. His rural acres lay in Sussex, south of Haslemere, and he was a keen shooter and fisher. Mac yearned to adopt these pursuits, but lacked experience, opportunities and cash. Now he began to edge into the rural world, and to explore a path to its pleasures. In 1938, for £50 he rented a cottage and rough shooting rights in Vernley Wood, a few miles from the Pallants’ place, and acquired an uncontrollable black spaniel which he christened Ruins, because the puppy was born in the old castle at Cowdray. A keeper looked after the dog while Mac was off earning a living.

      Bertie Pallant had a smart, stunningly beautiful wife named Ruth, possessed of infinite Irish charm and considerable Irish recklessness. She and Mac embarked upon an affair which persisted for some years. Bertie was apparently acquiescent, for the three often went shooting and fishing together. Ruth sized up Mac, and decided that his years working at Lyons had given him some sorely mistaken ideas about what constituted the high life. She set about purging his vulgarities, and transforming him into a gentleman. With the aid of Savile Row and Ruth’s generosity, his wardrobe dramatically improved. He acquired his first made-to-measure shotgun, along with an impressive array of sporting impedimenta. He discovered that the Trocadero did not, as he had supposed, represent the summit of sophistication. Years later Ruth, who became my godmother, told me without embarrassment that she regarded herself as the architect of the new-model Macdonald Hastings. The phrase ‘make-over’ had not then been invented, but that is what she imposed upon Mac. It had only one unfortunate consequence. Forever afterwards, he sustained a style of living without much attempt to reconcile this with his income. Ruth turned Mac into a dashing country-gentleman-about-town, lacking acres and cash to support his enthusiasms. This would lead to many tears before bedtime, mostly shed by Mac’s wives.

      Yet his career was taking off. In December 1938, a few months before the outbreak of war, he achieved the highest ambition of many of his generation of journalists: at the age of twenty-nine, he was given a job on the new weekly magazine sensation, Picture Post. Created and edited by the Hungarian Jewish refugee Stefan Lorant, it burst upon Britain with a force only matched, a decade later, by the coming of television. Indeed, with its bold use of live-action photographs, its elevation of the 35mm Leica camera to an instrument of magic arts, it represented the last old-media print revolution before moving images seized the ascendant. Picture Post became the most thrilling workplace in British journalism, and Father one of its stars.

      Mac had a fine visual sense, as well as natural skill as a wordsmith. Far from being uncomfortable about working in close partnership with a photographer, he adapted readily to the discipline. At the outset, he specialised in country topics. Then as now, journalists were an overwhelmingly urban breed, knowing little about rural life. This offered notable opportunities to a writer stricken with a romantic enthusiasm for the English countryside, such as Mac. There were more people who wanted to read about rural life than there were journalists capable of satisfying the demand. Political correctness being unheard of, Mac contributed big pieces to early issues of Picture Post on pheasant-shooting, badger-digging and otterhunting, as well as British farming, the life of a tramp, the work of vets. When King George VI paid a state visit to Canada, Mac was given a wonderfully glamorous transatlantic assignment. With a photographer he travelled to New York on the Queen Mary, recording the passage, then wrote two features on the city before travelling north into Canada. The King and Queen had just crossed the continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mac was sent to trace the same journey, and describe what the King saw.

      Afterwards, he travelled to the far north to write about life in the Yukon, visited a logging camp in British Columbia and the wheat prairies of Alberta, before catching the boat back to England. Back home, he persuaded the magazine to let him do a feature about buying a pair of handmade shotguns from Robert Churchill – though I doubt whether the £240 which he paid for them was chargeable to expenses. By the autumn of 1939, still just short of thirty, he had established himself as one of the young stars of Picture Post. The fears and sorrows of his teens were behind him. Journalism is more generous than any other career to successful young practitioners, offering not only a living, but almost unlimited opportunities for fun and adventure. Avidly, Mac set about exploring them.

       FIVE Anne

      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.