Did You Really Shoot the Television? (19 page)

I suggest that this passage shows how ponderous Father could be. Others say, however, that it displays his acute ear as a reporter. The family drove back to London that night in heavy silence. On arrival in Kensington, I scuttled gratefully away to my room and toys, and stayed in hiding from all save Nanny.

Granny, my father’s mother, recorded gloomily in her diary one weekend: ‘Anne brought nannie and the children to lunch. A nightmare. Children worse behaved than ever.’ This was hard on Clare, an exemplarily nice child, but accurately reflected the family’s mood of despair about the new generation. A growing number of my letters home from prep school referred to crimes alleged, denied, committed, or for which absolution was sought: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, I’m afraid I have no idea where the brown tape-measure is,
and I have absolutely nothing to do with its disappearance
’…‘I am sorry about stealing your little pistol and will never do such a thing again’…‘I
know
quite well I don’t deserve it but please let me start “
les vacances
” with a clean slate. I will place the money to pay for those Flit guns on your dressing-table as soon as I get back.’ Here is a
Sunday Dispatch
column my mother wrote in the mid-’fifties:

So it’s goodbye to the dear, gay school holidays and the tranquil pleasure of family life. It’s pleasant to recall how one sweet, romping day succeeded another. Take the first week with our little lot. My son got the mumps and other children staying in the house were hurriedly withdrawn in closed carriages by reproachful parents; when my daughter fell in the river (Father was in charge) and ran a temperature of 105 while the house was tense with recrimination; when I had to cancel two parties and tickets for the theatre; when the stove got a mood and I couldn’t get the oven hot; when 250 rose bushes and sweet pea plants, ordered in January, arrived in a crate with a note advising immediate planting.

Take the second pleasure-laden week, the week of the thrush’s funeral. When there was a sad little coffin and a funeral cortege and a tombstone movingly inscribed ‘May his little soul rest in peace’ and some good singing and everyone crying like mad. Crocodiles’ tears, really, because of course the children had murdered the bird. Convinced that they were St Francis of Assisi and Joan of Arc respectively (‘even the wild creatures would come and sit in her lap’), they had been unsuccessfully rearing nestlings on the kitchen stove. Left to itself, that fluffy chick would have lived to steal my strawberries in July. It was the week when the budgerigar got out and the car conked and we received a meaningless but disquieting bill from the income tax.

Take the third week, when my daughter got mumps, my son fell out of a tree (pushed, some say) and my husband hopped it to the Continent. When my best friends arrived on a flying visit from abroad, and I was stuck in the country, and they had a marvellous time without me. That was the week of too many Easter eggs eaten by too few people, with punishing consequences.

Take the fourth, climactic week of this idyllic season, when I went to London and got the mumps (‘Can you beat it, our beauty queen’s mumpy,’ my son reported laconically) and I wondered why people who permanently have small pig eyes in large criminal faces bother to live. When I had to keep getting up and posting cabbages to the country contingent, because in all country places there’s a chronic
shortage of fresh vegetables. When I had a breeze with the office, who couldn’t see why I couldn’t interview lots of sparkling people with a temperature of 101 – ‘Only don’t come near us,’ they said. ‘What about the sparkling people?’ I said, ‘they may not want it either.’ ‘Find some who’ve had the thing,’ they suggested. ‘That narrows the field,’ I said crossly, and went back to bed.

When my son took my daughter, well wrapped up, on a few minutes’ stroll in the sun, and brought her home, stumbling blindly, two hours later, gloves, cap and muffler gone. ‘We went a little too far,’ he explained. ‘For the last two miles, I had to prop her eyelids open with matchsticks to keep her awake.’ When I had to check a school clothing list of 86 items, making replacements to the tune of £20. Yes, they’ve been wonderful, enchanting holidays, though I use the word ‘holiday’ with a merry laugh.

My parents’ habit, endemic among journalists, of exploiting family life as column-fodder was a source of much embarrassment to me at school. Anne’s pieces reflected her vision of herself as a benign, harassed, multi-skilled housewife-career woman. In this she was the forerunner of an entire generation of female journalists who write columns from this perspective today. Years later, my own children reproached me for alleged parental shortcomings. I pointed out that I was never absent from the bucket-and-spade round. ‘Maybe,’ said my daughter tartly, ‘but you never looked as if you enjoyed it much.’ Here was a powerful echo of my own memories of Anne about the house – eagle-eyed, efficient, occasionally jolly, but seldom looking as if she relished the domestic bit, however often she professed in print that she did so. She did, however, have a notable capacity for retaining the loyalty of staff. Her cook Martha, as well as Nanny and our daily Elsie Elmer, stuck around for decades. Mummy possessed the virtue most important in relating to employees: with Mrs Hastings, everybody knew exactly where they were.

So, likewise, did I. In childhood and indeed adolescence, I lived in an almost permanent state of apprehension when she was about the place, lest the latest of my depredations should be discovered. An
objective observer might suggest that this attitude merely represented the usual professional distaste of the criminal classes for the proximity of the law, which reflects poorly on the malefactor, rather than upon the constabulary. Be that as it may, tensions relaxed dramatically when Mummy disappeared out of the door and I could resume whatever project I had in hand, safe under Nanny’s all-unseeing eye.

I loved to listen to Father, however. A significant part of his romantic nature, as well as of his peculiar brand of conceit, was to assume that any product, establishment or artist patronised by himself was the best of its kind imaginable. When he bought an Armstrong-Siddeley car, he declared authoritatively: ‘People who really know about motors regard this machine as better than a Bentley.’ He persuaded himself that Churchill shotguns were superior to those of Purdey or Holland, simply because he had struck up a friendship – on his side verging on hero-worship – with the gunmaker Robert Churchill. He asserted the literary superiority of Surtees to Dickens. He thought Noël Coward the finest playwright of the twentieth century, and Kipling the greatest poet of all time.

Impressed by Lewis’s 1917 Military Cross, he would assert to me in perfect earnest: ‘Some soldiers reckon a really good MC worth more than a VC, you know.’ He discovered a weird white Irish tweed named borneen, from which he had a summer jacket tailored that in due course, as an act of filial piety, I copied for myself. Each generation of politicians yielded to Mac a predictable hate-figure. Lloyd George was succeeded in his satanic gallery by Aneurin Bevan; Bevan by Tony Benn. He was captivated by the cleverness of a farmer in the pub who said of Benn: ‘If I had a dog with eyes like that, I’d shoot it.’ Mac’s views on politics and the arts could scarcely be described as nuanced, but he advanced them with a confidence unencumbered by doubt.

He sought to imbue his son with his own passion for the ancients

– he came from the last generation of educated Englishmen for whom the classics were a dominant force. He pressed upon me his favourite musty old Edwardian works – J.C. Stobart’s
The Glory that was Greece
and
The Grandeur that was Rome
. When first I went to prep school, he gave me an exam crib on all things Roman, entitled
Res Romanae
.
He wrote solemnly in the flyleaf: ‘Don’t lend this or lose it. It helped me to love and understand the ancients as I hope it will help you.’ I am not sure that the tattered little brown volume did any such thing for me, but I cherished it totemically, and still do, because it meant so much to Father.

He blossomed most eloquently and convincingly when speaking of the English countryside and its history. ‘Turnip’ Townsend and Coke of Norfolk vied for supremacy in his pantheon with Marlborough and Wellington. He perceived the development of English agriculture as a glorious pageant that persisted into his own days. He welcomed every advance in rural mechanisation and science with an enthusiasm which made him a darling of the industry. Until the 1970s, when he belatedly awoke to the environmental horrors unleashed during the preceding generation, his writing and TV films unstintingly celebrated the achievement of British farming. He loved men who worked the land, and spent many of his happiest hours in their company. His whimsical reflections on the countryside were among his best writing. ‘Foreigners give the English credit for three things,’ he mused in a characteristic passage. ‘The beauty of our children, the lushness of our pasture and the mettle of our horses. Why is it, then, that when all three are brought together, we who speak Shakespeare’s tongue call the occasion a gymkhana?’

By the mid-1950s, for all his success Mac harboured one notable unfulfilled ambition: for Africa. Though, metaphorically speaking, he had lived more than forty years at the feet of Lewis, absorbing his uncle’s yarns of adventure amid bush and beasts, he had never experienced these things for himself. He yearned to emulate Lewis’s rambles through great wildernesses under the sun, rifle shouldered and faithful servant at his side. Now he set about translating this dream into reality.

The success of
Eagle
, and of its Special Investigator column, offered Mac a splendid opportunity. He had almost exhausted the scope for undertaking
Boy’s Own
adventures close to home, and had little difficulty convincing the editor, Marcus Morris, that he should head for the Dark Continent in search of more extravagant excitements. He spent hours in earnest conclave with Lewis beside the library fire of the Savage Club in Carlton House Terrace. ‘Always remember,’ said the old hunter, ‘wild Africa is not on your side – you are irrelevant, at best.’ After much musing, Mac devised a challenge which might justify in print the expenditure of a significant amount of Hulton Press’s money. He would cross the Kalahari Desert in British Bechuanaland – modern Botswana – to search out the last of the ancient bushmen of the region, by then hunted and persecuted to the brink of extinction. He christened his quest ‘The Search for the Little Yellow Men’. One morning in 1954, accompanied by his favourite photographer Chris Ware and Lewis’s old big-game rifles, he embarked for Salisbury, Rhodesia, on a BOAC flight which in those exotic days stopped en route at Rome, Cairo, Khartoum, Entebbe and Nairobi, before landing at what was still the heart of Britain’s African empire.

Arrived in southern Rhodesia, where he proposed to outfit himself for his expedition across the Kalahari, he was undismayed by the disbelief of the locals, who recognised a greenhorn when they saw one. Father had a serene, endearing conviction that if he defined a purpose, however vaguely, it would be fulfilled. In those days it was deemed foolish to attempt a passage across Bechuanaland’s roadless
wasteland without a big truck and an accompanying Land Rover to extricate it from sand when it became bogged, as was sure to happen. When Laurens van der Post, viewed in Africa even in those days as something of a charlatan, conducted an expedition not dissimilar to Father’s a few months earlier, his equipage would not have disgraced a royal safari. Mac’s trip, by contrast, was entirely DIY, the austerity of its outfitting determined by
Eagle
’s modest budget. His hopes of enlisting the services of a game warden to accompany him were swiftly dashed: the professionals were all either too busy or too expensive.

After days of enquiry, in Bulawayo he at last located an old Chevrolet 1½-ton truck of wartime vintage, the property of ‘a huge beef of an Afrikaner with a drainy laugh and a chest like a tribal tom-tom’. He also met a twenty-year-old local named John Currye, who offered his services as driver and mechanic. Currye was no old bush hand, but a restless city boy who fancied an adventure, the perils of which he scarcely recognised. Mac gratefully enlisted him. They bought a water tank, spare drum of fuel, tarpaulin, spade, pick and spares. Chris Ware stocked up with a Primus stove, tin plates and eating irons, cans of meat and sardines, biscuits, fruit and a first-aid kit. At 5 o’clock one morning, they loaded the vehicle. Mac laid his rifles – a seven-millimetre for soft-skinned game and a .404 that would stop an elephant – on the rack behind the front seats. Then the truck ground fitfully westwards out of town on the first leg of a 1,500-mile marathon, towards the end of the metalled road at the Bechuanaland frontier.

Mac was often at his best writing for children. For their entertainment he could give full play to his sense of romance, as he did on the road to Maun that morning in 1954, setting out to seek the bushmen:

Men can keep on redrawing the maps; but Africa’s heart today remains as savage and untamed as when Lobengula ravaged the country with his Matabele impis. The
Panda-ma-tenka,
the old elephant hunters’ trail, is no more a road now than it was when Selous lumbered through with his ox-wagons to shoot for ivory with a Martini or a muzzle-loader. The elephant, the buffalo, the lion, the crocodile and the black mamba remain to dispute millions of
miles of undeveloped territory with their old enemy, man. In the southern interior, there is still a race of human beings, left behind in the struggle for progress, who exist now just as our ancestors used to live in the Stone Age.

Mac was the merest tyro in Africa, yet within days of landing in the continent he was driving unguided into its wildest regions. He felt himself at home because he had vicariously voyaged there for years, through the tales of his adored uncle. Lewis once met a bushman, when soldiering in German South-West Africa in 1914. He came upon the little man asleep beside the carcass of a giraffe which he had killed with a poisoned arrow. They conducted a halting exchange through the medium of Lewis’s local tracker, who spoke the bushman’s curious clicking tongue. The hunter said he was resting before going to meet his family, a day’s march distant. He would then bring them to the kill. Lewis speculated with a shudder upon the likely state of the meat, exposed to merciless sun, by the time the bushman brought his clan to eat it.

Forty years later, Lewis waxed lyrical to Mac about the joys of Bechuanaland, six times larger than Britain, and of the Kalahari Desert: ‘Its most important inhabitants are the buffalo; it’s still the private hunting territory of lion and leopard, the stamping ground of a million antelope, and all the better for that. It’s a place which man has never conquered and where even nature has never made up its mind.’ A fortnight after that conversation, Mac crossed the border into Bechuanaland, stopping at a police post to buy a licence to shoot game for the pot. ‘Oddly enough,’ he wrote, ‘I had no prescience of possible failure. Before we set out, I was gloomy and apprehensive. But, once we were moving in the old truck, I felt the way I used to feel as a war correspondent. It was waiting for the raid, the battle, to begin that was tough. Once the bomb went up, one felt exhilarated and carefree.’

Here he was, once more enacting in reality a childhood fantasy. I know exactly how he felt, because thirty years later I often experienced the same joyous sensation myself, setting forth in search of adventure at somebody else’s expense. For three generations of
Hastingses, Africa has proved the most intoxicating place on earth. In Mac’s day there was much less game than there had been in Lewis’s era, but the continent had not yet experienced the stunning human population explosion that was to come in the second half of the century. If Bechuanaland in 1954 was no longer a very dangerous place, it was still a wilderness dominated by animals, not people. Mac found himself in a personal paradise, memories of which he cherished until the end of his days.

Under the Union flag outside the District Commissioner’s headquarters in the tiny settlement of Francistown, DC George Atkinson studied Father’s truck.

‘How much petrol have you got?’

‘About sixty-seven gallons.’

‘Water?’

‘Twenty-four gallons.’

‘Guns?’

‘One .404, one 7-mill and a shotgun.’

‘Plenty of spares?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think you’ll get through all right.’

Atkinson told him that his best chance of finding bushmen lay far south-westwards, in the Ghanzi district. ‘If you find the real yellow bushmen, remember that they’re still pretty wild. It wasn’t long ago that four airmen who made a forced landing in the Kalahari were killed by them. Not long either since one of our District Officers was shot dead with their poisoned arrows. If you come up with them, don’t frighten them. It’s when they’re frightened that they tend to be dangerous.’ To get to Ghanzi, Mac needed to cross a bridge at Toteng which had been wrecked by floods, and was only now being rebuilt. Atkinson lent him the doubtful services of two local African ‘boys’ under detention, who would cook for him in return for their passage to Maun, where the local DC would provide replacements. Stay on the east side of the Okavanga basin, he was told. He could shoot his meat, and buy eggs and goats from native villages. They would reach the next waterhole in a hundred miles.

Atkinson waved them off. Mac loaded the seven-millimetre, and they began their long, painfully slow rollercoaster ride along what they quickly decided was the worst road in the world. It was not a road at all, of course, but a mere spoor through the bush. After three hours, during which they advanced about twenty miles, Father decreed that they should make camp in the shade of a big merula tree. They began to learn a little about John Currye. He had been born in the Congo, son of a Lancashire mother and Scottish father, and had never cared much for schools. In consequence, he proved a poor hand at the mathematics for working out quantities of fuel, water, miles. But this shortcoming was entirely outweighed by the fact that he was an enthusiastic companion, apparently untroubled by Mac’s inexperience, and a superb mechanic. That first night they extended their tarpaulin overhead from the roof of the truck, and slept beneath it. Thereafter, they learned better – using the canvas as a groundsheet, to restrain the worst of the myriad insects underfoot. The boys, named Wilson and Habana, were a trifle sulky as they cooked their mealies, because Mac had flinched on aesthetic grounds from shooting an ostrich which they had passed. ‘Ostrich very good to eat!’ urged Habana. John tried sleeping on the roof of the truck, but only once. During the night a merula branch collapsed on him. He awoke to find that a baby owl which had fallen from its nest was sharing his blanket.

The rest of the 320 miles to Maun proved an ordeal chiefly by heat. ‘Our eyes were half-closed with a rime of fine grey dust,’ wrote Mac. ‘Our noses were blocked, our lips cracked, and our tongues stuck to the roofs of our mouths like biltong. Our clothes were so sticky and stained with sweat that we couldn’t force our hands into our pockets. Our ribs were so sore from the pummelling we were taking in the truck, that every shattering bump punched a gasp out of us. The wind licked over arid plain and vast white saltpans like the breath of a furnace. At intervals whirlwinds, which we could see coming, spiralled into us and enveloped us, as we buried our heads in our arms, in a choking cloud of hot dust. All about us were bush fires, laying blankets of murky smoke along the skyline.’ The truck’s speed fell below 4 mph. Its radiator boiled constantly. Mac reflected on the consequences of a
breakdown, which seemed increasingly likely. Their water tank was soon more than half-empty. They drank often, but never enough.

Mac, however. was enchanted. Great herds of game roamed everywhere – wildebeest, springbok, gazelle, giraffe, in a profusion that, had they but known it, no successor generation of travellers would see. He gazed with delight on the birds, butterflies, monkeys. His first attempt to shoot a buck for the pot failed. He missed the shot because his hands were shaking so much from the lurching of the truck. Their baggage rolled and juddered in a hopeless chaos that tore the labels off food tins, smashed everything breakable including the glass of the hurricane lamp. Cartridges littered the floor. The reserve petrol drum broke loose, almost crushing Chris Ware. They were travelling along the fringe of a vast saltpan named the Makarakari, following faint truck tracks in the sand. When these were lost, they climbed anthills to scour the horizon through binoculars until they spotted the trail again.

Then they glimpsed a sudden patch of livid greenery ahead, and knew they had found Nata, the next waterhole. Just short of it, a flock of guinea fowl chattered in the scrub. Mac jumped down with his shotgun, stalked the birds until they rose clumsily into the air, then dropped three with two shots. They filled the truck’s water tank from a thin stream pumped up from the well, ate a little, and pushed on. A few miles beyond Nata, Mac stopped near a herd of wildebeest, and set out alone to stalk one with his rifle. As he plunged through high grass rearing above his head, he tried to remember Lewis’s advice, and carefully loaded and cocked the rifle. He could see only fifteen yards or so ahead. Within a few minutes, he realised that the wildebeest had winded him, and were gone. More dismaying, he had lost his bearings, and had no idea which way the truck lay. He shouted, and was rewarded only by silence. He suffered some minutes of nearpanic as he pushed blindly through the thick cover. Then he became more methodical. Fixing on a clearly identifiable tall tree, he circled this in widening spirals until at last he found the truck. It was a sharp lesson. Never again did he wander on foot without taking bearings.

They bounced and clattered on. Chris Ware observed that Mac at
the wheel resembled a golliwog on the end of a spring wire. Chris was excused driving duty, because his pictures were the priority. It was hard for him to keep his cameras, caked in dust, fit for use. At that night’s camp, all three men were almost too exhausted to eat. John Currye waxed lyrical about the joys of home in Bulawayo, racing his motorbike, drinking with the boys, listening to ‘jizz’. He said: ‘I may be a rough Rhodesian, but this is too rough for me.’ Father was optimist enough to assume that he didn’t mean it. Chris Ware observed with some feeling that properly organised safaris travelled with fridges and white hunters who knew what they were doing. Here, he remarked, he was at the mercy of a team leader who had never seen a lion outside a zoo. Fried guinea fowl failed to raise morale. Mac concealed from the others the fact that his bowels were in a state of mutiny.

Next day, however, everything got better. Mac shot a springbok from the cab of the truck, and found his spirits soaring: ‘I was learning the ways of Africa; and I began to get the fever of it in my blood.’ Writing afterwards for his audience of schoolchildren, he asserted his own idea of what life should be about: ‘You’ll find that there’s very little fun in playing safe. There is not much that I have come across that is worth doing without the zest of danger; the thought that you can so easily come a glorious cropper; the hope that if you keep your head, you’ll save your hide. In the arid, pitiless land of the Kalahari, I was saving my hide.’ After an apparent eternity of emptiness, they met a sudden outcrop of lush green vegetation. Rounding a bend, they saw a river before them, and after crossing a rough timber bridge they found themselves in the little town of Maun. This was the showpiece of what passed for civilisation in the Kalahari, complete with swimming pool, golf course and tennis courts. Within half an hour they were drinking beer from the fridge of Riley’s Hotel.