Did You Really Shoot the Television? (10 page)

Mac’s war experience made him a successful journalist – not a star, but a reporter respected in his trade, and known to informed people outside it. He was assigned as
Picture Post
’s war correspondent, and adored the role. Between 1939 and 1945 he reported from Channel convoys, destroyers and torpedo boats with the Royal Navy; flew on operations with RAF Bomber and Coastal Commands; described the London Blitz and the home front; then covered the North-West Europe campaign from Normandy to the Elbe. He later recalled gleefully the many occasions when he signed a ‘blood chit’, absolving the armed forces from responsibility for any mishap that might befall him on operations. He was able to combine his
Picture Post
role with regular broadcasts for the BBC, and indeed often described on the radio experiences which he also reported for the magazine. He was fortunate not to be posted to the Mediterranean or the Far East, where periods of intense action were interspersed with intervals of acute boredom. By staying in Britain, he found plenty to write about even when the war was temporarily quiescent. He contributed profiles of the Cabinet, described the glories of the corn harvest, visited battle schools and tank training camps. Until June 1944, save when he was attached to an operational unit, he was able to sleep in flats and hotels rather than tents and trenches.

Civilians have an exaggerated notion of the perils faced by war correspondents. Though reporters are sometimes under fire, they endure nothing like the continuous risks and discomforts borne by infantrymen, fliers and sailors. Nonetheless, Mac acquired a reputation for courage,
indeed recklessness. Photographers who worked with him on the battlefield returned with bloodcurdling tales of his enthusiasm for the fray. But however brave they may be, journalists remain privileged spectators. They see far more of their own homes, of hot food and warm beds, not to mention fame, than any fighting man. Mac had a good war, but also a privileged one.

When I first read his dispatches, at the age of sixteen, I put it to him that some seemed too gung-ho. They projected fighting men – especially bomber pilots – as much more enthusiastic about their roles than seemed plausible to me, even as an adolescent. ‘For heaven’s sake, boy,’ he said. ‘What I was doing was part of the war effort.’ During a struggle for national survival, it was essential for the media to project a positive image of what the armed forces were doing. Especially in the early years of the war, when Britain’s continued existence hung by a thread, it was impossible to tell anything like the truth about the inadequacy of the nation’s defences, the shortcomings of its forces. Mac’s wholehearted admiration for the men whose doings he reported contributed mightily to the popularity of his work. But few words written for publication in the midst of such a conflict have enduring merit. Only when the shooting and dying stopped, when peace came, was it possible to start telling the truth about what the war had really been like; about the tribulations, fears and shortcomings of those who fought it.

Anne’s passion to join
Picture Post
intensified after September 1939. She found it irksome to be working for a women’s glossy magazine while the world dissolved into flame. She tried a bold ploy, writing to
Post
’s editor Stefan Lorant to suggest a feature about
Vogue
. Lorant agreed. A photographer stalked
Vogue
’s offices for some days – almost all
Picture Post
stories were image-led. Anne herself then wrote the words for a four-page article. Soon afterwards, with the Nazis on Britain’s doorstep Lorant fled to America, and was replaced by Tom Hopkinson. The new boss invited Anne to come and see him. He had decided, he said, that the magazine needed a women’s editor. Would she do the job? She accepted on the spot, moved to
Picture
Post
early in 1941, and stayed for almost four years. Despite her job title, she saw this as her great opportunity to break out of the ghetto of women’s journalism. She wrote features on backyard farming, childbirth in the Blitz, clubs for the troops. She spent three days as a bus conductress in Coventry (‘Bit tall for the job, isn’t she?’ said a bewildered passenger). She described service wives, cooking with rations, refurbishing a bombed home, new treatments for war neuroses. Her picture often appeared in her stories, and in those days of
Picture Post
’s awesome market dominance, she became modestly well known. She learned on the job. When sent to interview Dr Shirley Summerskill, the MP had to tell her what questions to ask.

At first, Anne sought to use photographers whom she had known on
Vogue
to illustrate her copy. She soon realised, however, that the fashion magazine’s formal, mannered style did not work for
Picture Post
. Instead, she began to work and travel with the tough, buccaneering types on the magazine’s staff, notably the famous cockney Bert Hardy, whom both Anne and Mac adored, and who became one of the great news photographers of his generation. ‘Travelling with Bert was an education in the art of survival,’ she wrote. ‘He had a bulbous nose in a purplish face, but his charm moved mountains.’ Stuck on a train together, delayed for hours by bombs somewhere on the line, not another passenger could find even a Spam sandwich. Bert, however, returned from a foraging expedition with two steaming cups of tea. ‘How on earth did you manage it?’ the thankful Anne asked. Bert shrugged: ‘I just patted the girl’s hand, like, and it turned out she had a spoonful of tea left, so she made it fresh.’ Bert, whose links to the black-market fraternity were legendary, once gave Anne a box of chocolates. ‘Oh, Bert, I mustn’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t have seen yet another overloaded lorry.’ ‘Anne, I promise you, I ran after that lorry when I saw the crate fall off, but I couldn’t catch it up.’ After the war, Bert made a fortune in advertising photography and property. But, true to his Elephant & Castle roots, stewed eels remained his favourite dish.

Almost all the Hastingses and Scott-Jameses suffered the kind of Blitz mishaps that were the common lot of Londoners. Mac preserved
a hotel-room key, souvenir of a night when he returned from dinner to find the St Regis in Cork Street flattened by a bomb. His sister Beryl went one evening in March 1941 with her boyfriend Leslie to the Café de Paris, dancing to Snakehips Johnson and his West Indian orchestra. The Café was famous for its champagne, of which the manager claimed to have hoarded 25,000 bottles. It was crowded with young officers and their dates awaiting cabaret time –
The Kentucky Derby by Ten Beautiful Girls
– when it received a direct hit from a Luftwaffe raider. Scores of diners were killed, many more injured. ‘The macabre scenes which followed were among the most indelibly horrifying of the period,’ wrote Angus Calder, one of the historians of the Blitz. ‘One woman had her broken leg washed in champagne, while looters plundered rings from the fingers of the dead and wounded.’ Beryl and Leslie were dragged from the wreckage uninjured, and stumbled home to fall into a shocked sleep that lasted twenty-four hours. Afterwards, she found the Café’s silver menu card still in her handbag. For the rest of her life, she could never look at it without a shudder of horror.

Mac was by chance dining nearby at another restaurant, the Hungaria, when bloodstained and dust-covered survivors began to come in from the Café de Paris. In the men’s room, Mac encountered a tank officer scrubbing filth from his face. The man then strode off to find a table, observing in an authentic display of Blitz spirit: ‘Well, I’m going to finish my dinner somewhere.’ Two girls likewise arrived determined to dance for another couple of hours. They were accompanied by a little fox terrier which found recovery from its trauma at the Café far more difficult. It stood in a corner quivering with terror as the band played through the remainder of the evening.

Anne was asleep at the flat in Westminster she shared with Sally Graves when a near-miss shattered all the windows. Badly shaken as well as slightly burned, she felt obliged to go to the office in the morning after having her injuries treated, because that was what everybody did. She had to move flats, however, and sought refuge at Lesley Blanch’s place in Swan Court, Chelsea. Her father, Rolfe Scott-James, suffered more severely. He was blown out of bed by a
direct hit on the house next door to his own in Bayswater, suffering shock which imposed lasting effects on his health. The family home had to be demolished, and government compensation was meagre for a mere tenant.

Lewis Hastings adored it all, of course. Aged sixty, he hastened back from Rhodesia in the winter of 1939 to rejoin the army, was passed A1 fit, took a course in anti-aircraft gunnery and assumed command of an ack-ack battery. In the spring of 1941, finding home defence somewhat tedious, he got himself seconded to the BBC as a radio pundit. Lewis asserted that the secret of success as a broadcaster is personal conviction, with which he was bountifully supplied. The posting was initially for three months, but he was then given a title as the BBC’s Military Commentator, and filled this role until the end of the war. He made over a thousand radio broadcasts from Britain, the Mediterranean and North-West Europe, and became sufficiently celebrated for Goebbels to mock him on the air from Berlin.

Mac fell in love with Anne almost on the first day he saw her in the office of
Picture Post
in 1941. He told colleagues: ‘I’m going to marry that girl,’ and set about besieging her with characteristic panache. That summer he invited her to contribute to his weekly broadcast to America. Here is how he made the introduction, in an open love letter across the airwaves, by courtesy of the BBC:

When I’ve been blundering about trying to write from time to time on matters of feminine interest, I’ve often thought that what this column needed was the whisper of the petticoat and imprint of a lipstick. So this week, I’ve asked one of my most charming colleagues to end this
London Letter.
To introduce her, she looks as if she’d just stepped out of an advertisement. She has got a peaches-and-cream complexion such as men talk about and women envy. She knows more about American men than I do about American girls. She is as high as my heart, or higher, and the nicest girl that ever held a man’s hand under such a Bomber’s Moon as I’ve been writing about. Meet Anne Scott-James…

Anne’s piece which followed was about her garden at Rose Cottage:

I’ve been bitten by the gardening bug. At lunch with my girlfriends, I discuss not hats, not jobs, not books, not even men…but cauliflowers, blackfly and the horrible disease called Big Bud. At first, the beauties of gardening clothes helped to egg me on. I liked myself in dungarees, in corduroys, in linen shorts, and striped aprons. I liked the shiny feel of a new trowel and the quiet competence of new scissors. But now my motives are purged of vanity. I garden for the pure pleasure of digging and sowing and planting and pruning and staking and weeding – and picking and eating. I glory in a ruler-straight row of peckish young lettuce plants. I love my lupins. A pleasant thing, I think, that in the whirl of war we’ve rediscovered the excitement of making things grow.

One night in 1942, Mac flew on an operation over Europe with the Canadian crew of a Stirling bomber. He wrote his piece for
Picture Post
, and was busy on another assignment when the base commander contacted him. The crew with whom he had flown had been killed on their next ‘op’. Since he, Mac, was the last to spend time with them, would he write to their families? He found those letters among his hardest tasks of the war, penning plausible words about seven young men whom he had known for only a few hours, and with whom his relationship was as careless and transitory as so many chance wartime brushes. For thirty years afterwards, on the anniversary of their last mission the mother of one of the gunners wrote to Mac, pleading for any tiny detail of her son’s last days. He could offer nothing, yet felt obliged to pretend.

At Christmas 1942, Anne organised a party for US airmen at a big Tudor country house which she borrowed, near a Flying Fortress base in the Midlands. Supported by a bevy of
Picture Post
secretaries and models, she greeted the airmen with rum punch. They jitterbugged till the oak beams creaked, sang and conga-ed frenziedly. Too frenziedly, Anne thought. She was moved, indeed distressed, by the emotional extravagance and reckless drunkenness of the airmen,
whose wing had been taking heavy casualties. Many of them were shot down in the weeks that followed.

Lewis made his first parachute jump in company with Mac. The inspecting medical officer at the Ringway parachute school outside Manchester told Major Hastings that he was unable to pass anyone over forty for airborne training. By an odd coincidence, declared Lewis blithely, it was his fortieth birthday the following week. He duly jumped at the age of sixty-two, and was disgusted that the army instructors insisted upon dropping him into a lake, out of deference to his seniority. Later, in Sicily, encountering a rifle company that had lost all its officers, for some days Lewis contrived to take command. He accompanied the advancing Allied armies across North-West Europe, developing a warm regard for Montgomery, whom he often interviewed.

Lewis and his son Stephen never got on. In large part, I think, this derived from Lewis’s almost permanent absence during Steve’s childhood. Mac had a much warmer relationship with Lewis, and indeed was jealous of Steve’s closer blood tie. Whatever the reasons, Steve went through Eton and Sandhurst, and in 1940 became a regular officer of the Scots Guards (‘the regiment’, as it was known in his mother’s family, on the assumption that there was no other), with little contact with his father. It was a surprise to both when they met by chance during the Blitz, at the ack-ack battery Lewis was commanding. Steve thereafter went his own way, with scant acknowledgement from his father.

Yet Steve’s wartime experiences merited Lewis’s approval, indeed wholehearted admiration. Young Lieutenant Hastings had the most gallant war of any member of the family. In March 1941 he landed at Suez, posted to 2nd Scots Guards. Shortly after his twentieth birthday in May, he went into action for the first time as commander of his battalion’s 9 Platoon in Libya. He spent the year that followed in the thick of the seesaw desert fighting, during which he was awarded a Military Cross. He formed close friendships with several comrades, but developed a contempt for the higher leadership, from his own company commander upwards. When he heard that David
Stirling was recruiting men for special forces operations with his ‘private army’, L Detachment, soon to become the Special Air Service, Stephen immediately volunteered. Like other eager young blades, he wanted to escape the shackles of regimental soldiering. Life with Stirling, already a famous figure in North Africa, sounded vastly more rewarding.