Макс Хейстингс – Did You Really Shoot the Television?: A Family Fable (страница 2)

Max Hastings

Hungerford, Berkshire

ONE The Tribe

Lots of families possess delusions of grandeur about their ancestry, and ours is no exception. Tess Durbeyfield’s feckless peasant father liked to indulge a fantasy about his descent from the grand Dorset family of d’Urberville. Some modern Hastingses of our branch of the name cherished a notion that they should be earls. Both my father and his cousin Stephen were at pains to assure me that if there was any justice in the world, the Huntingdon peerage would rest in our hands, rather than in those of the upstart Hastingses who possess it. They wasted several hundred pounds, significant money fifty years ago, on a joint attempt to prove as much, with the aid of professional genealogists. Steve, a veteran Tory MP and Master of Foxhounds, married en secondes noces into the grand Fitzwilliam family. In old age, he became rather cross when I suggested that in truth – and as the evidence shows – our paternal ancestors were a pretty humble lot. Though some important people in British history have been called Hastings, it is impossible to trace connections between them and us. Walter Pater, asked if he was related to the French painter of the same surname, answered: ‘I hope so; I believe so; I always say so.’ This is charming, but silly.

I have no idea what our family did with itself before the nineteenth century, when we emerged as small-town Northern Irish Catholics, in an era from which few records of such people survive. Since Hastings is not an Irish name, I would surmise that some ancestor crossed from England in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, perhaps as a soldier. The first of my forebears of whom I know anything is James, who lived at Brooke-borough, Co. Fermanagh, in the early 1800s. The most notable characteristic of the Brookeborough Hastingses was that they were not merely Papists, in that fiercely Protestant society, but devout ones. God played a dominant part in their lives throughout the ensuing century. In the bitter years before Catholic Emancipation, when the 1798 uprising was a recent memory, several of them emigrated to the United States, where two became Jesuits.

My own great-great grandfather, Hugh, born in 1810, briefly attended Queen’s University in Belfast, moved to England in 1827, married a Wiltshire girl named Ann Sweatman, and taught mathematics and classics at various schools. He worked for a time in the 1850s as a jobbing writer at Knight’s Agency in Fleet Street, producing essays and articles on any subject required, including the geography of Fermanagh and the topography of London. This was the family’s first association with the Grub Street world which would loom large in our lives in the following century. In 1857 Hugh emigrated to America, where he taught at a school in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He was living there with his five children, among them my great-grandfather Edward, born in 1850, when John Brown staged his famous raid, which helped to precipitate the US Civil War. I still possess my great-great aunt’s narrative of the drama.

Conflict brought only grief to the Hastingses. Hugh was too old to fight, even had he wished to. His enthusiasm for the Southern cause prompted him to invest his tiny savings in Confederate bonds, an early instance of the family’s hereditary improvidence. When he decided to return to England, he was obliged to borrow the passage money from a friend. Late in 1862, broke and disappointed, Hugh Hastings reached London once more with his family. He spent the last years of his life teaching at University College School.

Somehow, despite their modest income, there was just enough cash to send Edward to Stonyhurst, the grim Jesuit public school in Lancashire ‘for the education of English Catholic gentlemen’s sons’. In 1867, the boy had just completed five Spartan years when his father suffered a stroke and died. Family hopes that Edward might study science at London University were dashed. He had to make a living. He was articled to a solicitor at a salary of thirteen guineas a quarter, and remained a solicitor’s clerk, albeit later a valued and well-paid one, for the rest of his life. Fortunately, a family friend provided him with an allowance of £75 a year to supplement his earnings.

In 1877, Edward married Elizabeth Macdonald, a Scottish teacher working in Carlisle – heaven knows where they met. The couple produced eleven children. The family’s income never much exceeded £400, yet on this they managed to occupy a relatively large and comfortable London house south of the river – 29 Trinity Square, Borough – and to send all the boys to Stonyhurst. Edward and his family inhabited the genteel lower-middle-class world familiar to us through The Diary of a Nobody. His writings and experiences echo those of Mr Pooter. Yet the family correspondence also reveals Edward, like his father, as a literate and devout Pooter, fluent in Latin and Greek. His religion was the core of his life.

Basil Macdonald Hastings, Edward’s second son and my grandfather, was to become the first of the family who made a living from the pen. His boyhood in that big Victorian family – ‘the Tribe’, as they called themselves – is minutely recorded, because many years later he published a charming account of it, Memoirs of a Child. He said nothing of his father’s spiritual torments and worldly disappointments. Basil merely rejoiced in an early life full of incident, in which a modest income somehow sufficed to provide fun as well as education. I first read his narrative when I was twelve, and it inspired me with a sense of heredity which is usually the privilege of grander dynasties.

Probably because Edward’s financial circumstances made close budgeting essential, as well as because he possessed a meticulous temperament, he commissioned custom-printed account books. In these, he recorded every detail of expenditure on behalf of each member of the ever-expanding Tribe. Ethel, his first child, arrived in 1879; Lewis, the eldest son – named for Leyson Lewis, the family benefactor who provided Edward with his vital allowance – in the following year; my grandfather Basil in 1881. Thereafter babies, all born at home, followed in a profusion that must have gladdened the heart of the family priest. Like Dickens’s much-put-upon clerk, ‘the Cherub’ Reginald Wilfer of Our Mutual Friend, Edward had a ‘limited income and an unlimited family’. The account books eventually contained separate pages for:

Hastings Mrs E

Hastings Ethelreda Agatha Gordon

Hastings Lewis Macdonald

Hastings Basil Macdonald

Hastings Gladys Mary Fraser

Hastings Beryl

Angela Macdonald

Hastings Claude Hugh

Hastings Aubrey Joseph

Hastings Everard Ignatius

Hastings Eulalia Emily Macdonald

Hastings Muriel Magdalen

Hastings Rene Francis

In 1890 the family’s annual income was £416, of which household costs consumed £200, rent a further £70, an annual holiday £17.11s.3d. Edward recorded expenditure upon himself of £6.2s.0d on clothes; 2s on hair cutting; £11.0s.6d on lunches; £3.12s.0d on travel. In 1901, the last year for which the account books survive, his salary was just £312.10s.6d, the family’s expenditure £319.17s.5d. This included seventeen tons of coal at £22.10s.6d; lunches at £6.2s.6d; £10 on a holiday; £6.2s.0d for clothing; one penny for a diary; half a crown for postage; £20 for Elizabeth; £3 or £4 apiece on the children, including 3s.5d for dress-lining for Beryl, and 2s.4d for Claude’s sand shoes. There were also assorted halfpennies for orphanages and the destitute; a few pennies apiece to the church choir, school treats and various Catholic charities. Edward bought one suit a year, collarless to save on the expense of ties. He paid £10 in income tax.

He was obsessed with keeping records, a habit honed by thirty years in a solicitors’ office, and he made his children follow suit. From their earliest years, transgressions were minuted. They were required to make formal confessions or promises of future good behaviour, like this one signed by Lewis:

I Lewis Macdonald Hastings do hereby pledge myself to my father as under

1. not to buy on credit

2. not to apply again to my father for a loan

3. to repay present loan of £2.5.0 by weekly instalments of 5/

4. I represent to my father that I want the present loan to repay R. Gray for a liability they have incurred on my behalf for a suit of clothes

5. to buy myself a nightshirt.

Basil suffered similar embarrassments, which he was also obliged to confess. Edward debated his own dilemmas in writing, as in this memorandum to himself, dated 2 May 1901: ‘Question: whether having power either to send Claude and Aubrey to Stony-hurst or to Wimbledon we ought to exercise that power in favour of Stonyhurst when the consequences will be that Muriel cannot be sent to school till she is 16.’ Stonyhurst’s fees were £14.18s.5d a year, plus £2.8s.6d clothing allowance. Edward considered, and rejected, a notion that if he borrowed money, Muriel might be sent away to school at fifteen. Instead, he made minute calculations about the cost of journeys to Lancashire. He concluded that a few pence could be saved by ensuring that the boys always took the college trap from the nearby station at Whalley. It was decided that Claude and Aubrey should indeed be sent to Stonyhurst, ‘using portmanteaux bought for Basil and Lewis’.