I am the least significant character in the story which follows. But it was an enquiry about the fate of the TV set in the London family flat of my childhood which prompted me to embark upon it. Throughout the long life of my mother, the journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James, I wrote little about our tumultuous family experiences. In 1986, featured as the castaway on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, I dodged tricky questions about parental relations. I incline to my mother’s view, that ‘All families are dysfunctional.’ However, when she enjoyed the same experience on DID in 2003 – and of course, most of us find it pleasing to talk about ourselves in such a context – at the age of ninety, she was much less inhibited. To the audience’s delight and my toe-curling embarrassment, she regaled Sue Lawley with tales of our old squabbles, and of my admittedly pretty frightful childhood behaviour. For weeks afterwards, people came up to me in filling stations and other unlikely places, demanding: ‘’Ere – did you really shoot the television?’ We shall address that question in due course, but I want to make plain immediately that it was not a big set.

The latter part of the book evokes personal memories of my parents and childhood, partial and fragmentary as all such yarns are. Until we reach the 1950s, however, I have sought to sketch some of the doings of the Hastingses and Scott-Jameses who came before me. Their experiences, journalistic and adventurous, fed my own aspirations. The tale is not founded upon delusions that our family has been important. The bylines of Macdonald Hastings and Anne Scott-James, which were modestly celebrated in the mid-twentieth-century media, are quite unknown to a younger generation, as is the way of the world. Most of us have been ‘nearly’ people. Some of the clan, indeed, barely kept their heads above water. We have spasmodically proved capable of making a little money, but never of hanging on to it. Though our collective experiences all over the world in the past century of war and peace have been varied and picaresque, other English middle-class families can boast similar excitements. What is unusual, I think, is that our lot wrote it down. Even the least materially successful were highly literate. They committed to paper what happened to them at school and at home, in fashion studios and newspaper offices, on battlefields, in the African bush, and even on a desert island.

The story is based upon published and unpublished autobiographical material assembled by its principal characters. Beyond the miscellany of family papers which I possess back to the 1850s, my grandfather Basil wrote a book entitled Memoirs of a Child; his brother, great-uncle Lewis, published an anecdotal autobiography, Dragons are Extra; Lewis’s son, cousin Stephen, likewise wrote The Drums of Memory. My father, Macdonald Hastings, published Jesuit Child and Gamebook, together with accounts of his most memorable journalistic exploits – The Search for the Little Yellow Men and After You, Robinson Crusoe. My mother wrote Sketches from a Life and In the Mink, which professed to be a novel, but was an almost undisguised memoir of her time in the fashion business. Her father, Rolfe Scott-James, published mostly literary criticism, but left a manuscript account of his relationships with some literary idols of his day. My stepfather, Osbert Lancaster, wrote a memoir of his childhood, All Done from Memory.

In addition, they produced millions of words of journalism, more than a few about themselves. Wherever possible here, I have allowed them to tell the tale in their own words. Such an approach is not a formula for objectivity. Leslie Stephen, creator of the Dictionary of National Biography, observed that ‘No good story is ever quite true.’ But this is a book designed to divert and entertain, rather than to enrich the annals of the times.

A very ordinary family’s doings attain interest when its domestic details are preserved from a century ago. There are lots of gaps – things which I have been unable to discover. For knowledge of feuds and scandals, for instance, I am dependent upon anecdotage rather than documentary evidence. Tolstoy famously observed that all happy families are alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That line prompts me to recall a sally of my mother’s, one day as we were lunching together, when she was a mere adolescent of eighty. ‘You still haven’t forgiven me for your childhood, have you?’ she said, with her customary abruptness. I replied that she was quite wrong about that. One should judge things by how they turn out. Most of my life has been uncommonly fulfilled. I probably inherited from her whatever talents I possess. I added, however: ‘If you try a different question – did I enjoy my childhood? – the answer is “no”. When I was three or four, I doubt that you and I would have recognised each other in an identity parade.’ Mumsy paused for a moment, brooding. Then she said: ‘Whoever did you hear of who did anything with their lives who had’ – the next bit in tones of withering scorn – ‘a happy childhood?’ She claimed that Frank Muir, her fellow panellist on the 1960s and ’seventies BBC radio quiz game My Word, was the only clever man she ever met whose domestic life appeared satisfactory from the cradle to the grave.

There may be something in what she said, though I doubt that its moral would deserve a place in a manual on child-rearing. On my side, there seems merit in writing a book like this at sixty-three, rather than at thirty-three or forty-three. Whatever follies Mummy and Daddy committed, I have had time to learn, as we all do, that the only privilege of children is to make different mistakes from those of our forebears. I have so often failed as parent, husband and everything else that I now understand, as few of us do before middle age, how hard it is to get things right.

Some details: in the text below, I refer to each family member by name rather than relationship. Thus, my parents are ‘Mac’ and ‘Anne’, rather than ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’, except when I write explicitly about our dealings with each other. I have mentioned money a good deal, because when I read books about other people’s lives I like to be told how they did, or did not, make ends meet. Trollope shocked his contemporaries by itemising in print the earnings from each of his novels, but posterity is grateful. I have said less about my sister Clare than her part in the family experience deserves, because it would be wrong to associate her with my perspective and judgements. Six years younger than me, a big gap in childhood, she saw things in her own way, invariably more temperate and less jaundiced than my own. Mac, Anne and I alike owed her more apologies than ever got expressed, for many and various injustices which we inflicted upon her. Likewise my half-sister Harriet Hastings, born in 1964, near the conclusion of the story told in these pages, has plenty to forgive us all for. I am happy here to make my own act of contrition to both siblings.

I have not written much about my own schooldays, which were disagreeable in the usual banal way. This is the story of a family, not about the miseries of English boarding education for boys who are no good at games. I have described in earlier memoirs – Going to the Wars and Editor – my experiences first as a foreign correspondent, later running the Daily Telegraph for a decade. Did You Really Shoot the Television? is a prequel. I have written it in fits and starts, and held back from publication until my mother, last of her generation of Hastingses and Scott-Jameses, was dead. My admiration for her will become plain, but she never appreciated my jokes.

I grew up with an exaggerated pride in my family’s journalistic and literary heritage. I only realised in adulthood how modest this is by the standards of serious writers. At the outset, I was obsessed with sustaining it. At seventeen, I had read almost all the forty-odd books which the previous two generations of Hastingses and Scott-Jameses had then published. Like most children, I passed through a phase of awe towards my parents, into one of scepticism which persisted for several decades. Today, I can enjoy the memory of my own mistakes alongside theirs, and draw pleasure from the fact we alike experienced adventure, editorship and authorship. A condescending critic might say that we scrambled on the lower slopes of literary endeavour. I prefer to think of us all as reporters, sharing many of the same thrills and spills – three generations in turn discovering that you are as good as your last story, until finally, as Tourneur observes, ‘That which would seem treason in our lives is laughter when we are dead.’

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Did You Really Shoot the Television? A Family Fable Max Hastings

Table of Contents

Introduction

Did You Really Shoot the Television?

A Family Fable

Max Hastings