Did You Really Shoot the Television? (23 page)

My prep school was generally underwhelmed by me. Horris Hill was a ‘feeder’ for famously clever Winchester, to which my parents wanted me to progress. When I was twelve, one of my Horris Hill headmasters, a bald-pated and sinister figure named Richard Andrews, a taller version of
Eagle
’s the Mekon, was about to administer a routine whacking (headmasters snapped their fingers in irritation at their own forgetfulness if a month or so passed, and they noticed that they had forgotten to beat Hastings). As Mr Andrews exercised his refined judgement upon selecting a cane, he said: ‘Winchester have just asked us whether, in our opinion, you are the sort of boy they should wish to have. We have been obliged to tell them that you are not.’ He gave me the sort of look which Captain Bligh inflicted on one of his less lovable mutineers, then addressed my bottom. When Mr Andrews died suddenly a year or two later, I found myself hoping that the stokers of hell were in especially vigorous form that day. Rejected by
Winchester, I went to Charterhouse instead, where I proved as considerable a disappointment as I had been at Horris Hill (‘His performance both in and out of school falls below the standard we would expect from a scholar…His contemporaries do not like him, and they are not bad judges of character’).

By that stage, however, my parents were relieved to have identified any institution willing to admit me. In a brief flash of optimism when I had been at Charterhouse for a few weeks, Mac wrote to my housemaster: ‘There is no doubt that he is idyllically happy at the school.’ Even Father the heroic fantasist, however, was unable to sustain this delusion for long. When he and Anne found nothing else to talk to each other about, there was plentiful scope for debate about what should be done to preserve their son from descent into a semi-criminal abyss. A considerable factor in Anne’s mounting exasperation with Mac was her belief that he should play a larger role in taming me. His eccentricities, which so delighted television audiences, seemed less sympathetic in a domestic context. His lack of interest in all practical matters, the assumption that somebody else would change plugs, mow lawns, fill cars with petrol or read bedtime stories, did little to promote harmony.

I would be surprised if Mac indulged in much sexual misbehaviour during his married life. His persistent infidelities were committed, instead, with firearms. He was fascinated by the cold, black metal of the barrels, the sublime beauty of crisply crafted actions and walnut stocks. His eyes glittered at the sight of a Purdy or Churchill shotgun, a fine Colt revolver or Mauser rifle. He fondled guns with the passion which many men reserve for women. Besides his battery of Churchill 12-bores, the house was strewn with eighteenth-century duelling pistols (off one of which I sheared the hammer, to my chagrin and Father’s not unreasonable fury), nineteenth-century revolvers, percussion and flintlock sporting pieces. Even in my most reckless moments, I never dared to fire those frail old weapons. Mac, however, indulged a phase when in place of a modern shotgun he deployed his 1820s Mantons against partridges and pheasants. It was an awesome sight to behold
the flash of the flint as he fired, the black powder smoke which wreathed him for half a minute thereafter. The birds were seldom much troubled by these assaults, but they provided Father with enormous pleasure.

It is not surprising that I was infected by his enthusiasm. Sometimes I bicycled a couple of miles to the spinneys and cornfields of a farmer who was grudgingly willing to let me attack his pigeons with a 20-bore. Maybe twice a year, Mac would take me with him to a pheasant day to which he was invited. I loved rifle practice on the lawn, writing from prep school at ten, ‘Please, please when I come out can Daddy gets lots of lovely .22 ammunition.’ But most of my dealings with his guns were illicit. From the age of ten or eleven onwards, whenever my parents absented themselves I took possession of the family armoury. Nobody in those days locked up guns, and most of Father’s stood ready to hand in a rack in the hall. Nanny was oblivious, my sister an uneasy spectator. I experimented with the handloading of cartridges, which caused Father some astonishment when he used them, unaware of their provenance. Those which I had overcharged with powder yielded thunderous explosions, following which a few pellets sped towards the planets. Where I had underdone the propellant, a shower of lead trickled limply out of his barrels.

The whiff of cordite whetted my appetite for more ambitious pleasures. In an oak chest in Father’s room he preserved his war souvenirs: a Polish Radom, a broomhandle Mauser and two Luger automatics, and – most thrilling of all – a Schmeisser machine-pistol, together with a plentiful stock of 9mm ammunition. At first I confined myself merely to stripping and reassembling the guns, at which I became probably the most proficient eleven-year-old in the world. Soon, inevitably, I dared to fire them. This proved exhilarating. When the coast was clear and parents safely absent, I invited a few friends round for tea, cucumber sandwiches and pistol practice. They giggled nervously amid the cannonade and later, I fear, told their parents, as I discovered a growing reluctance among playmates to accept invitations. I emptied a Luger magazine into the garden seat, which still bears the scars. I took to carrying a pistol or two on bicycle rides around the village, which provoked public resentment when reports spread that these were not
toys. A local view gained currency that the Hastings family, always known to be mad, were also bad and dangerous to know.

Late one dark night when Mother was at home and we were all in bed, I was awakened by stirrings outside the front door, obviously an intruder. Thrilled that here was my opportunity to repel an assault on the household, I seized a pistol, flicked a round into the breech and crouched beside the open window, drawing a bead on a shadowy figure below. A knock on the door prompted my mother to peer out of her window. A voice said: ‘Good evening, madam. Constable Jones. As I was passing, I noticed a bicycle outside and thought that somebody might be up to no good here.’ No, said my mother wearily, it was merely her son’s machine, carelessly abandoned at the garden gate. The constable saluted and disappeared into the night. Fortunate man, he never knew how close he came to a sticky end in the line of duty. I suffered a stab of vague awareness that I was in danger of carrying a good thing too far.

Nanny was oblivious of my games with guns, but my mother was dismayed by rumours which reached her. A report swept the family that on Father’s return from his latest foreign assignment, all the World War II weapons would be removed from circulation. Appalled, I chose my favourite pistol, the Radom, and secreted it in the luggage, together with a generous supply of ammunition, when we returned to London from the cottage. An evening or so later I was sitting in my room in the flat watching an instalment of an American TV drama –
Perry Mason
, as it happened. Most of my attention was on the screen, but as I viewed I caressed, stripped and reassembled the Radom, pushed in an ammunition clip, and snapped the gun at the screen. Mother, more than forty years later on
Desert Island Discs
, did me a notable injustice by suggesting that I became over-excited while watching a Western. It was not a Western. What happened was the fruit of momentary carelessness, such as could befall – well, any male member of the Hastings family.

I remember as if it were yesterday the spectacle of the TV disappearing in a sudden eruption of smoke and a cascade of glass, with much tinkling and clatter. I was so surprised by the effect, as was inevitable on hearing a gunshot at close quarters in Cromwell Road,
that I slumped back in the chair, pistol dangling limply in my hand. This caused Mumsy, rushing in seconds later, to assume the worst. I reassured her that all was well with everything except the un fortunate television. Should you be contemplating firing a pistol in a Victorian mansion block, and wonder whether the noise would trouble the neighbours, I can offer comfort. Nobody else in our flats, which housed such exalted residents as the novelists C.P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson, along with H.G. Wells’s old lover Baroness Budberg, complained about a thing.

Even by the standards of our family, however, the ensuing row was a corker. I remained in disgrace for weeks. Father, on his return from foreign parts, first demanded my assistance to sieve the wreckage of the TV and retrieve the bullet, lest its discovery by some third party led to trouble. All those wonderful war souvenirs vanished forever from the house, to a destination unknown. Father announced that a shooting expedition on which the two of us were scheduled to embark a fortnight later would henceforward become a fishing holiday. Even he, I think, was shocked by the intensity of my mother’s fury, which was evenly distributed between the two of us.

My enthusiasm for shooting was undiminished by the death of the television. But once childhood passed, I ceased to be as keen on guns as artefacts as was Mac. I was in my mid-twenties before I enjoyed more than occasional opportunities for pursuing pigeons and pheasants. At Rose Cottage in my teens, I was obliged to return to such humdrum pastimes as making plastic and balsa-wood model aeroplanes. Looking back, I cannot honestly say that I regret the era of pistol practice. Like all young malefactors, I was simply sorry that I had been caught. It was such fun until that silly moment when I overplayed my hand. I knew exactly how my grandfather felt when he blew up the toy fort in Trinity Square, Borough – I was already familiar with Basil’s account of that episode.

Mac, meanwhile, turned his attention to more serious matters. He was tuning up for the most dramatic, indeed preposterous, episode of his journalistic career, which also proved the final landmark before the break-up of our family.

Three Hastingses – Mac, Anne and myself – have at different times featured as guests on the BBC’s
Desert Island Discs
. Mac possessed unique credentials for his appearance: he had himself experienced life as a castaway, albeit a voluntary one. It was the apogee of his unflagging and often ill-judged pursuit of adventure. In the summer of 1960 he was pressed for money, desperate to make a coup to rescue him from the insistent clamourings of the Inland Revenue. His relations with Anne had become sulphurous. He was seized by a yearning for escape, a breathing space. Most people in such circumstances go walking in the Lake District or catch a boat to Le Touquet. Mac chose to have himself marooned on an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean, equipped only with a gun and a hunting knife.

That bald statement improves only marginally upon reality. He loved wild places, was unafraid of loneliness, and had a deep and ill-founded faith in his ability to fend for himself. He was heedless of the fact that, at fifty, he was absurdly old to undertake such an adventure. Journalists frequently decide that they want to fulfil a fantasy, then look about for someone to pay them to do it. Mac had always been more successful than most in achieving this, through his assignments for
Picture Post
,
Eagle
and BBC TV. Now he sold the idea of emulating Robinson Crusoe to the highest bidder, which proved to be
The People
Sunday newspaper. Its editor agreed to pay him £5,000, which seemed good money in those days, to spend five weeks marooned in conditions of suitable privation. With his usual enthusiasm, Mac began searching for somewhere sufficiently awful to fill the bill. His friend the novelist C.S.
Forester suggested an outpost of the Grenadines in the Caribbean. A club acquaintance who had just retired as director of the Ordnance Survey favoured a pimple off the east coast of Malaya.

Finally, however, Mac settled for an atoll in the Amirantes chain, just beyond the Seychelles. His mother, Billie Hastings, scribbled in her diary on 11 July: ‘Mac rang to tell me that he is flying immediately to an island in the Indian Ocean until the end of September. Very worrying!’ Anne was beyond argument, and perhaps also concern, about any folly which Mac chose to commit. While the castaway stunt was still in the melting pot, she set off on her own long-planned and pleasantly glamorous assignment in Kenya for the
Daily Mail
. All her bills were of course being paid by Lord Rother-mere. Her trip was profitably completed inside three weeks, a very different proposition from the challenge Mac now set himself.

My own farewells to him were nonchalant, however, because his departures had become so familiar. My faith in his powers was unbounded. I responded to news that he was departing for a desert island much as Superman’s son, had he possessed one, would have received news that Dad was off for another bout with Lex Luthor. The outcome never seemed in doubt. The insurance broker who covered Mac’s life for £10,000 had a similarly exaggerated confidence in his client. He charged a premium of less than £30.

The haste of Mac’s going was prompted by the fact that in those days the Seychelles were reachable only by rare steamship sailings from East Africa. There was no airstrip. Mac, however, discovered that the Royal Navy’s frigate
Loch Insh
was due to sail in a week from Mombasa for a goodwill visit to Mahe, the Seychelles’ capital. His celebrity enabled him to hitch a lift for the three-day passage, with Admiralty blessing. He packed his beloved African bush jacket, the aforesaid gun and hunting knife, together with a blank journal and some borrowed Leica cameras with state-of-the-art self-timers, and caught a plane to Nairobi. Anne was astonished to be confronted at the New Stanley Hotel by her husband, who displayed no interest in her bush odyssey, and merely plunged into describing his own plans for self-immolation. They parted without much display of
emotion on either side, he for Mombasa and she for the Masai Mara. Anne was especially annoyed that Mac had without consultation breached a longstanding pact, whereby during school holidays they should never both simultaneously absent themselves abroad.

A week later, he took up residence at Government House in the Seychelles, to organise his outing in the sun. In those days when not much happened in the islands between Christmases, the arrival of a well-known journalist on a mission of such startling battiness provided a welcome variation of the diplomatic round. The British community rallied round enthusiastically, to ensure that Mac’s ordeal was a success.

He found a tough old skipper, an Irishman named Harvey Brain, known locally as ‘Cyclone’ because he talked so much about storms. ‘Cyclone’ agreed to carry him to the Amirantes as soon as his schooner, the
Marsouin
, had offloaded its cargo of salted shark. Bemused locals instructed Mac in the arts of splitting coconuts with a panga, weaving rope out of palm stems and constructing a fish trap. He lay awake nights reading a borrowed copy of the classic
Fishes of South Africa
, a catalogue of the Indian Ocean’s monsters of the deep which alarmed him somewhat. To provide company, the local Botanical Department presented him with a giant turtle, which he christened Fifi. A British civil servant about to return home bequeathed to him Richard, a tough young terrier of exotically mongrel origins. Mac added the dog to his entourage, happily without its discovering the responsibilities which it must fulfil to earn its new name – Friday. His luggage expanded to include an axe and mattock, panga, cooking pot, fishing lines, coil of rope, paraffin lamp, antiseptic and bottle of brandy for emergencies. A cheerful local doctor warned him that if he could not find greenstuff, symptoms of scurvy should show after a month: aching muscles, foul breath, bleeding gums. Mac surrendered his wristwatch for safekeeping, knowing that he would have no appointments to keep. Then Harvey Brain took the
Marsouin
to sea, where the schooner promptly sailed into one of the worst storms the region had known for years.

Fifi the turtle was flung hither and thither across the hold, among the remnants of the sharks. Friday crawled into the fo’c’sle to die. Movement aboard was impossible save on hands and knees, as the
vessel plunged and soared through towering seas. The mainsail boom swung wildly to and fro, threatening the unwary with being smashed overboard. On the first night, the Creole cook somehow prepared a mess of food over an open fire on deck, which Harvey, Mac and the three crewmen ate jammed into the little wheelhouse. It proved their last meal for thirty-six hours. The seas rose to a frenzy. Mac staggered forward and retrieved the terrified, pulsating Friday from his refuge, then wedged himself with his head against the ship’s sternpost, legs dangling over the companionway, with the dog in his arms through the long hours that followed. Mac’s narrative will sound familiar to any modern aficionado of Patrick O’Brian’s sagas of sailing ships amid the elements at their most fearsome:

Below the waterline the crash of the sea on the bows, the whining of the rigging, made a noise as if all the people in the Seychelles were whispering behind their hands about me. The stink of shark made me retch. The crash of the sea slapping against the planking, the tumult of loose stores, scared the wits out of me. Friday was piled in a tangle of luggage. The bunk was tipped upright, the companion way behind me was horizontal, and the door into the hold had burst outwards. For a moment the bow of the
Marsouin
was pointing straight into the air. It wasn’t until she was sinking into the trough of the swell again that I got my bearings. This happened three times. I was exhausted with the mere effort of staying put and keeping some sort of control of the stuff clattering about, like dice in a box, in the sweating acrid heat of the black hole I was incarcerated in. In the glimmering light, I imagined that grimacing faces were drawing towards me and drawing away again like images in a nightmare. Gargoyles, not people, seemed to be saying ugly things close to my ear. It was a form of delirium, I suppose, induced by the claustrophobic horror of the reeling cabin, the fever-heat of the atmosphere, and lack of food. Friday clung to me.

Brilliant red cockroaches crawled from their holes in the planking and scuttled about the cabin. With a crash, the skylight shattered, littering Mac with fragments of glass. Under heavy rain and with
seas relentlessly breaking inboard, he and Friday were soon awash. Harvey Brain shouted down the hatch that he was heaving to until daybreak. In those shallow, reef-ridden waters, he no longer dared steer a course until he could fix a position. The sails flapped in the shrieking wind. The
Marsouin
rolled through an ever more unnatural arc, each sidelong descent threatening to be its last. It seemed an eternity before the motion began to ease. After thirty-six hours at the wheel, Brain dropped onto the netted frame that passed for a bunk, and fell into a sleep which eluded his passenger.

Next morning, once more under sail on a less turbulent ocean, they made their landfall. The seas were still too heavy for the schooner to deliver Mac directly to his chosen atoll, which bore the name of Ressource. Instead, Brain steered to the nearby island of Darros, where three hundred labourers gathered copra under a British manager, Marshall Dyer. It was months since they had received a visitor. A pirogue, a long, narrow craft rowed in perfect rhythm by a team of sweating Seychellois, put out from shore. When it came alongside, Mac explained his purpose. With astonishing lack of astonishment, Dyer agreed to drop him at his destination, a few miles distant. Mac, dog, turtle and baggage were loaded into the pirogue, and the castaway bade farewell to Harvey Brain, who said he would return in five weeks to retrieve the bits. The skipper offered him a parting gift of three onions, saying that he would need them to ease the pain of scorpion bites. Then the oarsmen bent to their labour. The craft raced over the reef, collecting six inches of green water in its bottom as it shot the surf. Finally, it grounded on the flat stretch of sand and palms which was to be Mac’s residence for the next thirty-five days.

Friday bounded joyously ashore. Mac threw away his last cigarette. Putting a hand into his bush jacket pocket, he found himself clutching a final warning from the Post Office about failure to renew his TV licence. Marshall Dyer said that if Mac wanted to bottle out–though he described such a contingency more delicately – he should hoist his shirt aloft a pole on the sandy point at the tip of the island. Somebody would spot it sooner or later. Then the pirogue’s crew pushed off, leaving Mac sitting atop his modest heap of possessions,
cursing mildly to himself for not having thought of trimming his nails while he still had access to scissors.

The adventurer felt no great emotion as the craft vanished beyond the reef. He had determined to make himself a castaway, and now here he was. With Friday leaping eagerly ahead of him across the virgin sand under the sun, he set out to explore: ‘Ressource was so cosy, so much the very model of the desert island of romance, that it had the unreality of a film-set,’ he wrote. The island was threequarters of a mile long, and at its narrowest point no more than fifty yards across. The beaches were fringed with wild laurels, the entire atoll clad in coconut palms, some rising forty feet. ‘Every wrinkle in the shoreline,’ he wrote later in his sojourn, ‘every irregularity in the floor of the lagoon, almost every tree on the island is now so familiar that I find it difficult to recapture the mood in which I first explored it.’

On the first day, the habit of going clothed remained ingrained. He wore underpants as he paced his new domain. Thereafter he donned shorts only when he was photographing himself. ‘One part of me,’ he wrote in the journal which he began to keep, ‘is still listening for the sound of people and traffic, looking for electric lights to switch on, half-expecting someone to call. When I was gathering wood for the fire this afternoon, there was a moment when I imagined that I could hear a telephone ringing.’ He was pleasantly surprised by the absence of unfriendly creatures: ‘In Africa, the ground seethes and the air hums in daytime with warring insects. There’s a savage stillness in the night, an atmosphere of watchful menace, of eyes pricking the dark. Here, under the broad dial of the moon making a fretwork pattern of the palms, it’s hard to believe that there’s any hostile element at all.’ He was enchanted by the absence of fear in the birds, the terns which brushed his head and dive-bombed Friday. Hump-shouldered herons strutted up to examine their visitor. Yellow-legged bitterns peered from the scrub on the shoreline. Vast shoals of tiny fish flung themselves exuberantly into the air amid their cruising grounds in the shallows.

Mac was never a heavy eater, and in the first days he took little
trouble about foraging. Friday turned up a clutch of wild chicken eggs in the scrub above the shore, which his master boiled and shared with the dog. He slept poorly. The night was rendered hideous by the wailings of fouquets, a species of shearwater, in their burrows around his bivouac. When Friday woke, which was often, he licked Mac’s face with unwelcome enthusiasm. Dog and man alike were pestered by land crabs, some of them huge red brutes with claws big enough to crack a coconut. Every half-hour or so, with the regularity of a temple gong, a coconut fell from one of the palms and thumped ‘ker-boomp’ on the sand.

When the blazing red tropical dawn came, Mac rose, and used a finger to clean his teeth in salt water. He ran a dissatisfied hand over the stubble on his chin which he now had no means to remove. He and Friday then set off on the scrounge, looking for wild pigs, which they had been told they might expect to encounter. Nothing so useful appeared. Instead, they saw a ginger cat, which the dog chased up a tree. A deserter from a ship’s company? They never knew, and only once again glimpsed the animal during the weeks that followed. Friday caught a scrawny wild chicken, which they boiled for the pot, recklessly sacrificing one of Harvey Brain’s onions for a relish. It proved delicious. Mac used the bird’s innards as bait to catch a fish of indeterminate identity, weighing around two pounds. On the beach they found the lid of an oil drum, which made a serviceable frying pan. Mac realised that, in the fierce heat, there was no possibility of husbanding food overnight. He and the dog must live from meal to meal, day to day. He was conscious that he had failed to identify edible greenstuff.