Did You Really Shoot the Television? (14 page)

I was equally awed by my mother, but in a different way. For a start, she was dauntingly tall, near enough six feet. Though she liked to perceive herself as a shy, fawnlike slip of a girl, in truth she possessed the habit of command, and an absolute intolerance of fools. She seemed a pattern of glamour and fluency, never less than flawlessly turned out, seldom at a loss for the
mot juste
, not infrequently acidulous. I often attended Mother’s bedside early in the morning, where she sat surrounded by newspapers – we took them all, of course – telephone and breakfast tray prepared by our faithful London daily, Mrs Elmer. There was the ritual of telephoning Harrods, to provide a list of groceries for delivery. In those, its elegant pre-Fayed days, I grew up supposing that it was natural to purchase all commodities, from stamps to underclothes, writing paper to toys, at the great Knightsbridge emporium. We met in its banking hall, my hair was cut in its barber’s shop, tea was taken in its restaurant, school uniforms were ordered from its menswear department. The delusion that Harrods was the only possible place for a properly conducted London household to do its shopping later precipitated my first financial crisis, when I attempted to adopt the practice at my own expense.

Even in my childhood, Anne not infrequently gave vent to a disobliging remark or two about Mac before setting off for work. Brisk, concise instructions were given to Nanny and Mrs Elmer, a peck on the cheek was administered to me, then she swept out in
a haze of scent and high purpose. Although my ideas were sketchy about how she spent her working hours, I gained occasional insights by being conscripted as an extra for fashion shoots. In those days, as never thereafter, my appearance was thought appealing. Decked in tweed cap and coat or more casual attire, I was photographed beside breathtakingly arrayed, formidably painted models in Bond Street, Markham Square, Pall Mall, or attending a supposed family picnic – enlivened with a primitive barbecue – in Richmond Park, which did duty as a rustic location. There was no money and not much glory in these assignments, in the days when models earned two guineas for a shoot, maybe three if they were stars. But in me they assuaged a craving for attention which already dismayed my critics. Early experience established my conviction that everything interesting and agreeable in London happened within two miles of St James’s Square. The rest of the great metropolis was tiger country.

Ours was the last generation to learn to eat with a silver spoon and pusher before graduating to adult dining equipment. ‘Nursery food’ has become a modern term of contempt, but oh my, as Mole would have said, it was delicious. Nanny’s expertise at gratifying small palates, not to mention her own, had been refined over half a century on three continents. A modern nutritionist would recoil in horror from the fattening treats which she put before us. Anne complained that she was obliged to resort to serious black-marketeering to keep Nanny supplied with rationed tea. Even in the worst days of post-war austerity, I remember every nursery meal with delight. Sardine and cress sandwiches, Shippam’s meat paste, bread and butter with hundreds-and-thousands, meringues, treacle sponges, Swiss rolls – we gorged on them all. On red-letter days, we had chocolate cake from Fuller’s. When I devoured an entire example in a couple of sittings, Mummy expostulated crossly that it cost six shillings and ninepence. To this day, I think of Fuller’s cakes as the supreme delicacies of childhood, and mourn their passing.

Mummy’s return from the office was the signal for me to bound into the drawing room for a few minutes’ exchange of pleasantries, and sometimes a game. However modest the flats which we inhabited
in London, and even though Mac and Anne had no ‘good’ furniture, thanks to her taste the main rooms were invariably elegant. Their tone was raised by some fine old china inherited from Violet Scott-James, and a few striking pictures: an Augustus John watercolour; a magnificent Ardizzone originally painted to illustrate Mac’s Mr Quill stories for
The Strand
; the odd Rowlandson drawing. The drawing room and its contents mercifully escaped my childish depredations, which were confined to the nursery end of the premises.

Anne later commented balefully upon ‘that awful final round of Ludo before bed, varied occasionally with Snakes and Ladders’. My remorseless demands for the same game day after day reminded her, she said, of the fate of Tony Last in Evelyn Waugh’s
A Handful of Dust
, condemned in perpetuity to read Dickens to the maniac Mr Todd. Television did not enter our lives until a set was bought in 1953, at the same moment half the country did the same, in order to watch the Coronation. Until that date, and the pleasures of
Muffin the Mule
and
Whirligig
which followed, my cultural horizons were bordered by radio, comics and books, to which I was addicted from the moment I could read. Perhaps the only periods of childhood in which I could be thought profitably employed were those during which I was engrossed in
The Sword in the Stone
,
Children of the New Forest
and a relentless procession of adventure stories, many by G.A. Henty and H. Rider Haggard. I became intimately familiar with Athos, Porthos and Aramis, while remaining complacently ignorant of the names of any footballers. I developed a passionate allegiance to
The Wind in the Willows
, and an equally violent hostility towards deluded little souls who preferred
Winnie the Pooh
. Ugh!

Having sought to describe my mother, it is only just to acknowledge her perception of me. She wrote:

I have always been slightly afraid of Max, whose audacious nature overpowers my cautious one, and afraid
for
Max…He was not the usual wrinkly baby, but a completely finished product with a purposeful expression. He looked quite at home in the world, firmly demanding what he wanted. At eighteen months, sitting up in his high chair at a seaside
hotel, an admiring elderly lady said to me, ‘He does enjoy his food, doesn’t he?’ There was no chucking his egg around or leaving his food unfinished. At two he spoke so fluently that he could have made a political speech. At five, when we took him for an interview at his pre-prep school, the headmaster’s wife said, without admiration: ‘I have never seen such a self-possessed child.’ I am sorry to say that when our party left the study for the schoolroom, he had pushed her aside and gone through the door first.

It was a black day when my education began. I attended Wagner’s in Queen’s Gate, one of those smart London day schools which did so much to mould little imperialists – yes, even at that late stage – and taught us a little. Schools and I never prospered together, though Wagner’s was less beastly than those which came afterwards. I began to discover how bad I was at making friends, to learn that self-absorption is no more plausible a formula for social success at five than at twenty or thirty. The only relationship I remember well from that period was with Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s grandson, whose father Vyvyan knew my parents. For the most part, I was an outsider. I lacked any self-corrective mechanism. I adored Nanny because she spoilt me rotten. My will was much stronger than hers. Discipline was entirely lacking from my rompers regime, never mind afterwards. It required years of marriage for me to learn some basic manners which I should have acquired in the nursery, had I been a more receptive pupil, and Nanny less malleable to my demands.

With a modicum of cunning, I easily circumvented her attempts to impose rules. Since my parents were seldom in evidence, I acquired the early habit of doing exactly what I liked, and found it hard to vary this practice merely to appease teachers in the classrooms of 90 Queen’s Gate. Mr Lefroy, the headmaster of Wagner’s, observed at a prize-giving (though I never myself won a prize at any school): ‘Max Hastings resembles a Chinese firecracker, which we expect to explode at any moment.’ While this sally raised a laugh, it was not intended as a compliment.

In my irritation at Mummy’s absences, I lacked any perception of
the difficulties every woman then faced if she attempted to combine marriage and motherhood with a career. The more significant her professional role, the greater were the dilemmas which she encountered. ‘[Anne Scott-James’s] editorship of
Harper’s
,’ in the words of one of Elizabeth David’s biographers, ‘established her as part of that brisk, well-educated, increasingly powerful, yet still rather embattled breed of women journalist-editors.’ Her generation were pioneers, and suffered fearfully in consequence. As she left in the morning, I pleaded, ‘Mummy,
try
and get back for tea,’ adding resignedly: ‘But I know you’ll be late. Shall I see you in my bath? Anyway, mind you’re home before I go to sleep.’ Nanny said: ‘Now, do be early, today, madam. We’ll keep you a meringue till half-past five, and not a minute after.’ But half-past five found madam with a queue of people still waiting outside the editor’s door, and letters to sign. Anne recorded later the spasm of regret which she experienced as she thought: ‘Bang goes my meringue,’ and everything it stood for. She described a typical schedule on days when she accompanied us to do clothes shopping:

2.00 Buy Chilprufe vests and Shetland cardigan at Hayfords.

2.45 Winter coat and leggings, Debenham & Freebody

3.30 Business appointment in Grosvenor Street. Nanny and Max wait in car reading
Peter Rabbit.

4.00 Socks, shoes and blouses at Harrods. Nanny pays while I hurry to telephone couturier who is only in between 4 and 4.30, when he leaves for America.

4.30 We divide forces. I take a taxi back to the office, and send Nanny and Max home in the car.

Likewise on birthday party days, her notebook was scribbled with memos to herself about a confusion of matters professional and domestic: ‘Speak printers re May colour pages. Write April lead. Plan 2-colour section for June. Order birthday cake at Green Lizard. Twenty-one presents, 12 boys, 9 girls. See Judy about photographing Oliviers for New York. Candles, balloons, records,
Nuts in May
and
Mulberry Bush
. Fix advertising meeting. Separate table for nannies?’ When party day came, there was always a phone call from her secretary in the midst of ‘Happy Birthday’:

‘I won’t keep you five seconds, Miss Scott-James. There’s a cable in saying will you be in Paris the first collection week or the second? What shall I say?’

‘Better say the second week.’

‘Bye.’

At summer holiday time, Mummy usually drove us down to Devon, Cornwall or whatever other little paradise had been booked. She stayed through the first couple of days, then raced back to the office, leaving me on the sands with Nanny, her thermos flask and sewing, and later my sister Clare. Anne wrote:

I found those lazy days by the sea piercingly sad. Perhaps because the English summer is so short, there is always a dreadful nostalgia about a summer’s day, marguerites and poppies in a dusty field, or white cliffs throwing long evening shadows. In your mind, your child’s mind becomes all mixed up with your own, and the pathos of innocence become an agony which keeps the tears welling in your eyes.

I used to sit half-choking on the beach as I watched that touching back view: little Max in blue mackintosh waders hand in hand with stalwart Nanny, both paddling inch-deep in the tiny breakers of low tide, Max clutching a hopeful bucket in his free hand, Nanny holding up her skirts above her varicose legs.

‘Oh God, make it last, make it last for ever,’ you mumble mournfully. But hell and damnation, you are driving up to London late tonight and coming back for just one day to fetch them. It is not the mild regret of leaving any ordinary pleasant occasion; it is the splitting of the heart, the butchery of one’s own youth.

‘Mummy, mummy, watch me cut a crab in half,’ calls Max from the water’s edge. He, at least, was not troubled by sentiment.

Yet by Anne’s own admission, her emotions were confused about how long her patience could have endured the simple pleasures of
sandcastles and West Country teashops. She nibbled without enthusiasm at pink and green dainties, topped with synthetic cream.

‘Could you eat my share of cake, Nanny? I don’t really feel like it.’

‘Well, I’ll be greedy, madam, and have just the tiniest bit.
Bite
it, Max,
bite
it. What do you think your teeth are for?’

‘I’ll order some more toast, Nanny. I’m sure you’re hungry after all that sea air.’

‘Well, it
is
nice toast, isn’t it? Perhaps just one more slice. Give over pawing that cake, Max. Either take it or leave it, but don’t just pick the nuts off the top.’

Anne sobbed through the first few minutes of her lonely drive home, but found that as the miles went by, her mind began once more to turn to, and then to race about, her beloved magazine. She was planning a new feature as she reached Hammersmith, ‘tossing it about in my mind as in a butter-churn’. She thought: ‘I must phone Frances tonight and get her to chew it over, and we’ll get started on it tomorrow.’ By midday next day she was again absorbed in her work. Like most clever women, the tiny world of the nursery could never have satisfied her. Even as a child, I sensed her impatience with it.

Today, this is all familiar stuff. The world has changed dramatically to meet women’s needs and aspirations. But in Anne’s day there was no accommodation, no pity for a woman who chose to try to do it all. She felt overwhelming social pressure to look like a ‘proper’ mummy as well as a committed magazine editor, and went through the motions with dogged, desperate deliberation. She never filled the domestic role with conviction, and I came to despise her efforts as mere masquerade. She tried to behave as mummies were supposed to behave, but the outcome resembled an amateur dramatic performance.

All these years later, I see that my scorn was unmerited, and I sympathise with her dilemmas. She deserved professional fulfilment. There is also the small matter that without her income my upbringing would have been incomparably less comfortable. Father’s means could not alone have sustained the lifestyle we enjoyed, the social pretensions to which I grew accustomed. But it was hard to see those things half a century ago, when Mummy’s impatience with
‘Happy Families’ was manifest, her sophistication sorely tried by bedtime stories. She inspired respect and fear, but uncertain affection. None of us in our family were great kissers. I scarcely remember physically embracing either of my parents, far less seeing them indulge such a gesture towards each other. In part, this reflected the scepticism of the times – the English times, anyway – towards exhibitions of emotion. But the Hastingses carried undemonstrativeness farther than most.