Mac achieved a brief spasm of happiness with his introduction to school theatricals, playing Morgiana the slave girl in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. But he found the brutality of the Stonyhurst system unforgivable. In that last year of the war, boys with richer parents were permitted to pay for extra food such as bacon and eggs, which Mac did not receive. Because the Jesuits censored the boys’ letters home before dispatch, it was impossible for him even to reveal his miseries. Bullying was institutionalised. Not long after his arrival, in that cold, dank, draughty, cavernous place, Mac contracted pneumonia. Their matron, ‘the hag’, shrugged her shoulders and wrote him off. A Jesuit gave him the last rites with an insouciance the memory of which disgusted the boy when he defied probability by surviving. He never forgot the readiness of his keepers to deliver him to his Maker.
At Stonyhurst, he wrote later, the Jesuits ‘devoted an unconscionable time getting us ready for the next world before we were even ready for this one’. His ‘beaks’, like most pedagogues, were poor pickers of people. Boys who achieve office in their schooldays often sink without trace thereafter, ending up as secretaries of suburban golf clubs. The qualities which commend prefects and games-players to teachers are seldom those which will prove of much value thereafter. Willingness to conform is perceived as the highest good in schoolboys, but it ill fits them for any subsequent attempt to reach the stars. School masters are also the only people on earth who claim a right to place money on horses after races have been run. Decades on, they seek to embrace former pupils who have prospered in life, however abominably they treated them in childhood. This was Mac’s experience.
While recuperating after his bout of pneumonia he was granted a respite, staying with his family at St Leonards-on-Sea for the duration of one glorious missed school term. Then he was returned to Lancashire, his father assuring him, with timeless fatuity, that modern Stonyhurst was much less harsh than it had been in his own and Lewis’s day.
Mac learned to live with the place, if never to love it. When he advanced from Hodder to the main school, and began to achieve some academic success, his life brightened. From an early stage he displayed a gift for public speaking, and always applauded the fact that the school taught Elocution as a specific skill: ‘I am best in the class at Latin, English, History by heart and all oral work,’ he wrote exuberantly in November 1918. He urged his parents to come and see him perform in the Shrovetide play, but said he realised that the expense of the journey to Lancashire would probably be prohibitive, as indeed it proved. ‘We have had two holidays because the armistice has been signed. I have learned two pieces of poetry for you when I come home, The Jackdaw of Rheims and the other King John and the Abbot of Canterbury Cathedral. I wish you would tell Daddy to send me some of his articles now, especially out of the Sunday Herald. He has made a name for himself here. I’d love to tell you more but Tempus Fugit.’ A Stonyhurst report for 1919 suggested that Douglas ‘showed distinct talent as an actor’.
Mac shared the enthusiasm of almost every Hastings schoolboy through the generations for tales of war and adventure – Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and The White Company – ‘the fights are simply ripping’ – together with all of Kipling, especially the Just So Stories. He loved the school cadet corps, and relished any opportunity to use firearms – there were no guns at home. His toys were those of his time: Meccano, model soldiers, cigarette cards. The arrival of a new Gamages’ catalogue was a big event. He was increasingly fascinated by the countryside. Roaming the fields and woods around Stonyhurst, he developed a knowledge of birds and plants remarkable in the child of a family which was anything but rustic.
His language reflected not only the period, but also a natural exuberance which persisted for most of his life. He was always ‘working like blazes’, his latest acquisition was ‘topping’, ‘ripping’, or ‘hairy’. He developed a mild interest in racing, and was extravagantly impressed by a schoolfriend whose father owned two horses. To the end, he tolerated Stonyhurst rather than loved it. Thank Heaven, he never considered sending me, his own son, there. Its oppressive devotion left him almost entirely irreligious. The Catholic Church’s spell upon our family was broken. But Mac retained a grudging gratitude for the education he received, for the classical and literary enthusiasms Stonyhurst awakened, and for the eloquence and powers of self-expression the school promoted.
At home, he grew up in a mildly bohemian literary world, focused upon family homes with such coy addresses as Wella Willa, Pickwick Road, Dulwich; then later in rented country cottages, of which the longest-tenanted lay near Winchester. He sat at the feet of such friends of his father as Hilaire Belloc, whom he asked breathlessly whether he had indeed, as he recounted in print, walked from London to Paris with only sixpence in his pocket. ‘Young man,’ responded Belloc magisterially, ‘I am a journalist.’ Mac remarked later that this exchange provided him with an early hint about the merits, when composing contributions for newspapers, of tempering a strict regard for truth with some savouring of romance.
G.K. Chesterton, another Catholic author, likewise favoured him with advice: ‘As I went out into the world,’ the old sage said, ‘I would meet two sorts of great men: there were the little great men who made all those around them feel little; and the great great men, who made all those around them feel great.’ Mac shook the hand of Kipling, and was much in awe of his father’s familiarity with such literary stars as J.M. Barrie and James Agate, as well as of his constant appearances in newspapers and on theatre bills. Yet Basil’s efforts to repeat the success of The New Sin yielded continuing disappointments.
His first post-war play, A Certain Liveliness, opened at the St Martin’s in February 1919, then swiftly closed. A month later, his dramatisation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory received its first performance at the Globe. This was a project which had been almost three years in the making. In July 1916 the actor-manager H.B. Irving had written to Conrad, then fifty-eight, urging him to agree that Basil, ‘a dramatist of some standing’, should adapt Victory for the stage. Here was implausible casting. The novel is a dark work which ends in wholesale death and tragedy, while Basil was at his best composing light pieces. But Irving persuaded both playwright and novelist that a collaboration was feasible. A month later the three met at the Garrick Club for discussions.
Basil wrote a vivid account of his first encounter with Conrad, whom he found surprising. ‘Unlike my books?’ demanded the novelist with a smile. Basil replied: ‘On the contrary – just like your books, and not in the least like a retired captain of sailing-ships.’ Conrad put his head on one side,
a birdlike gesture that was common with him. When he talked to me he showed enthusiasm only when I said anything challenging. His eyes would light up, and he would argue eagerly, at the same time giving the impression that he was trying to satisfy himself that I was right. Never was there a more flattering talker. He raised all those with whom he came in contact. It was as if one had been blessed. I do not suppose he bared his soul to anyone save in his books. He charmed you into telling your thoughts. Never was there a more courteous man, and I think he was conscious of this quality and proud of it.
Basil wanted to create the play in active collaboration with Conrad. At the outset, the novelist insisted that the theatrical adaptation should be the dramatist’s work alone. But over the next two years Conrad wrote Basil many letters, advising on passages of dialogue, details of clothing and sets. He explained, for instance, that the character Jones is ‘at bottom crazy…a psychic lunatic’; that the façade of Schomberg’s Hotel on Java, the principal setting, had three arches, with wooden tables beneath them. ‘A play must be written to seen situations,’ he observed. Sometimes Conrad was moved to write to the dramatist explaining the profound emotions which stirred him in passages of his own novel: ‘I give you my word, Dear Hastings, I wouldn’t have let out a whisper of it if your letter had not prodded me to the quick…Victory, don’t forget, has come out of my innermost self.’ They met often, usually at Conrad’s urging, when some special problem was identified. Basil sustained deep respect for the passion and intellect of the novel’s
