Did You Really Shoot the Television? (18 page)

One of the few neighbouring couples both my parents liked were the Wysards, who occupied a large house of which even as a child I was envious, not far from Bradfield. Tony Wysard, a pillar of the Thursday Club, had established a pre-war reputation as a caricaturist for glossy magazines. He spared himself further exertion, however, and wasted a significant talent, by marrying the heiress to the McDougalls flour fortune, an agreeable but highly strung and scatty woman named Ruth. Tony emerged from the war a major in the Rifle Brigade, a rank which he affected until his death. With his
impeccable tailoring, twinkling eye, boisterous charm and fine regimental moustache, he looked every inch the hero.

He liked to describe how, in the days after Dunkirk when everyone was preparing to repel the invaders with Molotov cocktails, he insisted on uniformity among each of his platoons, arming one with petrol-filled champagne bottles, a second with hock bottles, a third with claret and so on. His house was filled with military memorabilia. It came as a shock to me, when once I asked a mutual friend whether ‘Uncle Tony’ had served in the desert or North-West Europe, to receive the disarming response: ‘Oh, Tony never got nearer a battlefield than Dover.’ Thus did one discover that a fine military bearing can be quite unrelated to military achievement. Tony was, however, the most convivial and generous company, seldom quitting Rose Cottage without slipping me a ten-shilling note, sure path to my heart. A splendid raconteur, eyes glittering with genial mischief, he lifted a bushy eyebrow theatrically to emphasise his climaxes. He laughed heartily at the antics of both Mac and myself. But privately, I think, he was himself too cautious a character not to be alarmed and sometimes appalled by our excesses.

Mac and Anne’s relationships with their extended families were tenuous. Marie and John Scott-James, Anne’s siblings, died at fifty and forty respectively. The sisters were never close, though Marie had sufficient literary bent to review novels for the
Observer
. Anne’s father, Rolfe Scott-James, continued to live in his cottage, The Forge at Upper Basildon. Five years after Violet’s death in 1942, he married a French academic named Paule Lagarde, who taught at the London School of Economics. Anne detested her stepmother, whom she described as ‘hard as nails, the sort who gives the French
bourgeois
a bad name’. Occasional family teas at The Forge took place in an atmosphere of icy formality, sometimes obvious rancour. As a child, I perceived grandfather Rolfe merely as old, grave, crusty. He died, aged eighty, in 1959. The charmless Paule inherited his modest estate, a source of further bitterness to Anne, for it eventually passed to her stepmother’s French nephews and nieces.

We saw something of Mac’s mother and sister, Billie and Beryl, at
the restaurant which they then owned in Marlborough with Beryl’s husband Leslie Scott. The dread hand of snobbery reared its head here. I knew Beryl and Leslie only as a jolly and generous couple, without children themselves, who occasionally took me to London productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. My father, however, was underwhelmed by Leslie’s cheerful vulgarity and shortage of aitches. After his brother-in-law died suddenly in 1959 and Mac failed to attend the funeral, his relations with Beryl were never again close. She remained a mightily kind figure in my life, however, and often regaled me with stories of Mac’s childhood disgraces, which strengthened my hand in excusing my own.

Grandmother Billie Hastings, Basil’s widow, was likewise sweet to Clare and me, but never concealed her dismay about her son’s improvidence, my behaviour, Mac and Anne’s incompatibility. Granny was a great worrier, and life had given her plenty to worry about. A good Catholic until her death in 1960, worshipping for forty years at the Brompton Oratory until she left London for Wiltshire, she was distressed by the absolute lack of religion in my parents’ lives – and in Clare’s and mine. It all seemed to her a sad falling-off from the days when Basil and his brothers and sisters were pillars of South London’s St Vincent de Paul Society. A Victorian sceptic once proposed that all churches should bear a sign: ‘Important –
If True
’. Mac retained a primitive, non-churchgoing belief in a Deity, but Anne lacked even that.

Lewis was the only one of Basil’s brothers and sisters whom Mac broke bread with, or indeed of whom I knew anything. The rest of ‘the Tribe’ of his aunts and uncles played no part in our lives. Mac met Lewis regularly in London, and made sure that I got to know him. Anne, rather surprisingly, found the old boy immensely attractive and loved his rich, booming voice. I was captivated by him. He told war stories, occasionally took me to see war movies, and once terrified me by an attempt to teach me to swim through plunging me headlong into the surf of a Cornish cove. But there was no shared contact involving Marigold. Neither Lewis nor Mac saw anything of Stephen, and I scarcely met him until I was in my teens. When I
enquired about my cousin – seeing his name in the paper as an MP and suchlike – Father merely said priggishly: ‘Lewis has never thought Stephen quite the thing.’

This was unjust, but reflected enduring tensions between father and son. After the war, Steve joined the Secret Intelligence Service, with which he served for more than a decade in Finland, France and Cyprus, becoming an ardent Cold Warrior. He entered the House of Commons as Member for Mid-Bedfordshire in 1960, and served as a Conservative MP for the next twenty-three years, espousing causes and enthusiasms right-wing even by the standards of Lewis and Mac. Steve contrived to move in much grander circles than other Hastingses, and eventually married into a stately home, Milton in Cambridgeshire. A notable horseman, he became something of a hero in Leicestershire hunting circles, especially after once winning its famous cross-country race, the Harborough Ride. He recoiled from acknowledging to himself, still more to the world, that his own family antecedents were humble, even slightly disreputable. Though without personal fortune or indeed earned income, Steve loved to play the aristocrat, which no other representative of our branch of the family has pretended to be. Lewis and Mac were impatient of his snobbery, treated him as a lounge lizard and indeed cad, and reciprocated his disdain. Anne detested him, both for his politics and his pretensions. The consequence was that Clare and I met no circle of cousins on either side of the family, save occasionally Marie Scott-James’s daughter Clarissa, some years older than ourselves.

My parents resolved their irreconcilable tastes in conversation, as in so much else, by meeting most of their acquaintances separately, on neutral turf. Anne pursued a social life in London, where Mac embraced his clubs. In the country, he periodically disappeared alone on sporting expeditions, a source of much chagrin to me, who yearned to accompany him. I received riding lessons at the Chieveley stables of a leathery old retired cavalry officer named Major Glover, which neither convinced my instructor of my talent, nor imbued me with much enthusiasm for horses. What I wanted was to be taken shooting and fishing. Father, however, seemed more eager to spin yarns about
moors and rivers than to show them to me. At the time I thought he was selfish, which he certainly was. Later, however, I realised that he also lacked scope or cash for getting me started as a country sportsman. He had a gun for some years in the Iliffe Estate syndicate, near the cottage at Yattendon. For a few seasons he ran a wild little shoot on the Downs above Compton, on a farm owned by Claude Wilson’s insurance company. His part-time keeper, Mr Allright, occupied a cottage in Aldworth and boarded ferrets, one of Mac’s brief enthusiasms. I was sometimes taken to join the guns for lunch in the pub, and to follow along for a drive or two. But his game book suggests that he shot only a dozen times a year, even when he was in funds.

Almost the only shared fishing expedition I can remember was undertaken one Sunday, on a stretch of Piscatorial Society water near Newbury. We went equipped with the wherewithal for catching roach and perch. When we set off along the riverbank, I was entrusted with a large ball of breadpaste. In a careless moment I deposited the bait in the grass, then could not for the life of me remember where. In those days of rigid rural sabbatarianism, there were no shops open from which to buy fresh supplies. ‘Well, that’s the end of that, then,’ said Father crossly, and took me home. Years later, he once took me on a holiday to the Shetland Islands in pursuit of sea-trout, but we caught nothing all week, and never looked like doing so.

What did I want from my parents, which I did not get? I still find it hard to answer the question. Materially, I had a pretty comfortable middle-class childhood. No one was ever cruel to me – my mother seldom intended to generate the fear which she inspired. Nanny indulged her charges disgracefully, not infrequently offering Clare and me little subsidies from her own purse, a habit which persisted until her death. Some of our happiest hours with Nanny were spent completing football pools coupons together. Like her shrewd stock exchange investments, her pools entries prospered with surprising frequency. Occasionally she would take me to stay for a few days at the little terraced house she owned in Sheffield, trips which I enjoyed hugely.

Both Clare and I owed much to Nanny’s love, to the fond smiles which beamed from her kind old face. I can see now how desperately lonely was her life. She possessed a scanty acquaintance even among her own kind, never took a holiday, seldom even a day off. Almost everything she owned in the world reposed in her musty little bedroom at our London flat. She claimed just one friend, a Sheffield neighbour named Mrs Green, to whom she often wrote painstaking screeds, and whose doings formed a staple of her conversation. Yet, even to my childish eye, Mrs Green never seemed as keen on Nanny as was Nanny on her. Nanny clung to us as desperately as we clung to her. Poor, dear woman, she had nothing else.

I was fearful of being accident-prone, a sensation which took forty years to subside, and which was obviously rooted in experience. Why was it that, even when not bent on mischief, I had to smash my fishing net through the glass front door of our holiday hotel on Jersey, incurring a hostility from the management which persisted through our stay? How could it be that my passion for bonfires, which a generous infusion of petrol was obviously indispensable to ignite, so often precipitated major conflagrations? I also yearned to discover how to relate successfully to other people, and blamed my parents for my inability to do so.

One of the great boons of middle age is that most of us stop being jealous. We cease to envy other people’s greater wealth, fame or apparent happiness, and better understand the sorrows which almost every family harbours. My wife Penny likes to quote a Jewish saying: ‘If you make all those round the table lay their troubles down upon it, you take a look at everybody else’s, pick up your own and walk away.’ In adulthood, one learns so much about the horrors of other people’s childhoods that the shortcomings of one’s own recede into insignificance. This has certainly been so for me. A friend not long ago told us of his boyhood, during which his mother was married six times, and he was dispatched to spend holidays from Eton in children’s homes. His experiences, he said, have rendered him incapable of intimacy with either sex ever since. By any objective measure, and certainly by such a formidable standard of misery as he achieved,
I had little to complain of. But fifty years ago, my sorrows and frustrations seemed real enough.

Lacking talent for ball games or companionship, I wanted to get on with growing up, to escape from my own social failure. At school I fared reasonably well academically, but was the last to be picked for any team. Popularity eluded me, with both masters and boys. In my awe of my parents’ achievements, which seemed so great because they were trumpeted in print, I was full of fear that I could never match them. I was irked that we seemed less rich than we deserved to be, and occupied more modest homes than other boys. We seldom did anything together, as a family. Not only did I form few friendships, but I seldom received invitations through children of my parents’ friends, because they had almost none in common.

Many of my misdemeanours arose from being a solitary, with only my sister to exploit as a plaything. Clare was six years younger than me, and I blush to remember how poorly I repaid her sweetness and loyalty. She was often the sole witness of my crimes, sworn to secrecy: ‘You won’t tell Mummy and Daddy, will you?’ She saw me drop Father’s lovely Walther .22 rifle from a treetop house, smashing the stock, then glue the pieces together again, so that discovery of its destruction was postponed until the weapon was lifted from its rack. Clare was often an innocent accessory, sometimes indeed victim, during and after my crimes. When I was eight, Father penned a magazine piece entitled ‘Conversation with my Son’. Here is how it went:

‘Can I have some nails for my hammer, Daddy?’

‘It isn’t your hammer; it’s mine. And what do you intend doing with the nails?’

‘I’m making a soap box car.’

‘Where?’

‘Up at the toolshed. It’s quite all right, Daddy, I’m not doing any damage to your things. Really I’m not.’

‘What’s that stuff on your hands?’

‘Just paint.’

‘Just paint? You’ve got some on your face, too. No, don’t rub it off on your sleeve. Haven’t you got a handkerchief?’

‘It’s in my other trousers.’

‘Now, where did you get this paint?’

‘It isn’t any good to anybody, really, Daddy.’

‘I didn’t ask you whether it was any good. I asked you where you found it.’

‘Somebody had thrown it away with the junk in the toolshed.’

‘What led you to suppose that somebody had thrown it away?’

‘The tin was jolly rusty.’

‘What have you been doing with it?’

‘Just painting.’

‘That’s self-evident. I want to know what you’ve been painting.’

‘The kiddie-car.’

‘Clare’s kiddie-car?’

‘I asked her if she’d like it in another colour, and she said she would.’

‘So you did it to oblige your little sister? Where is she now?’

‘Up at the toolshed.’

‘What’s she doing?’

‘Riding the kiddie-car.’

‘The one you’ve just painted?’

‘I told her it was wet paint; but she wouldn’t wait, Daddy.’

‘Just you wait till your mother hears about this. I thought you two seemed suspiciously quiet this morning.’

‘Where are you going, Daddy?’

‘Where do you think I’m going?’

‘If you’re going to the toolshed, there’s something I want to say to you.’

‘Go on.’

‘I’ve spilt a bit of paint – only a little bit, mind – on the door.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve painted the door as well.’

‘Only half of it, Daddy. I couldn’t reach the top. I wanted to make it all nice before you came up the garden.’

‘That was thoughtful of you.’

‘Do you want to go inside the toolshed, Daddy?’

‘Certainly. Why not?’

‘Well, it might be a bit difficult at the moment. You see, Clare was very naughty and I thought she was going to take her kiddie-car on the road.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, Daddy, I used some of those old bricks up the garden. I knew you wouldn’t mind because they weren’t any good anyhow, to make a barricade.’

‘Let’s get this clear. Since you have been up the garden this morning, you’ve found a pot of paint and spread it over yourself, the toolshed door and the kiddie-car.’

‘Yes, Daddy.’

‘You have now bricked up your sister in the toolshed, where she is riding the kiddie-car you have just painted.’

‘I told her not to, Daddy.’

‘So you’ve already assured me. As a matter of interest, since you’ve bricked up the door, how have you yourself been getting in and out of the toolshed?’

‘Through the window.’

‘But that window won’t open.’

‘It’s open now, Daddy.’

‘Do you mean you’ve broken it?’

‘I was coming to that, Daddy. It was an accident. It wasn’t me. The boy next door cracked it with his bow and arrow. I told him you’d be very angry.’

‘So the boy next door is involved, too?’

‘No, Daddy, he’s gone home now.’

‘And the cracked window?’

‘Well, I thought it wasn’t much use having a cracked window…’

‘So you’ve done the job properly?’

‘You can hardly notice it’s missing now, Daddy.’

‘Is there anything else you want to tell me before I inspect for myself what you’ve been up to?’

‘Oh no, Daddy.’

‘You haven’t been in the garage, have you?’

‘Only to get the oilcan.’

‘The oilcan?’

‘The kiddie-car needed oil badly.’

‘Did Clare go with you into the garage?’

‘Yes, but I sent her out at once because she climbed into the car.’

‘Did this happen before the painting of the kiddie-car, or afterwards?’

‘Afterwards, Daddy.’

‘And after Clare started riding it?’

‘Yes, Daddy.’

‘Go down to the house immediately and ask your mother for some turpentine.’

‘It’s O.K., Daddy. I thought you might want it, so I took it up to the toolshed for you.’