for forty years. Though mid-market catering never made them rich, it provided them with a decent living. Beryl, devoid of the social pretensions which have been the undoing of so many Hastingses, was a tough, cheerful professional who worked hard all her life, neither demanding nor receiving a break from anybody. The harsh experiences of her youth rendered her prudent and cynical. She admired her brother’s gifts and later success, but despaired of his excesses, alcoholic and financial.
Mac’s trouble was that he never knew when to stop. It was tremendous fun to party with chorus girls, but in 1936 he went a disastrous step further, and married one. He was twenty-six, she was a fifty-two-year-old divorcee named Eleanor Daisy Asprey. The alliance lasted only a few months, but he was obliged to pay his ex-wife maintenance almost until the day he died. With misplaced chivalry and a dislike of rows, even when a well-wisher informed him thirty years later that his ex-wife was cohabiting with a man whom he, Mac, had been effectively supporting for years, he refused to go back to court. He admired women, and they were often attracted to him. But he lacked the slightest notion about how to treat them as human beings, or else was too selfish to learn, a vice which some claim can be hereditary.
It took time for Mac to achieve his ambition of becoming a journalist. While working at Lyons, he offered occasional contributions to newspapers and magazines, then in the late 1930s began to do some broadcasting. He performed first for the commercial station Radio Normandy, graduating to becoming a contributor for the BBC. His early ‘talks’ were whimsical, rather in the style of Basil’s essays. Mac was deeply, indeed exaggeratedly, conscious of his father’s reputation, which flickered on for some years. He often asserted that one of the best days of his life came when a stranger said, ‘I really enjoyed that piece of yours.’ Mac said, as he had grown accustomed to saying, ‘I think you mean of my father’s.’ The stranger replied, ‘No, no – it really was yours.’ In due course, I would experience the same sensation myself.
Mac was prompted to make a clean break with Lyons by an experience one night as he stood waiting for a girl in the foyer of a restaurant, clad in carnation, white tie and tails. Tapping a patent leather shoe impatiently, he was reflecting upon what a fine figure he cut when a stranger approached, demanding: ‘Have you got a table for two?’ To Mac’s horror, he perceived that instead of looking the perfect man-about-town, as he supposed, he had acquired the proprietorial demeanour of a head waiter. He resigned from Lyons amid expressions of mutual regret – sufficiently sincere that years later, Monty Gluckstein sought to woo him back on generous terms – and set about making his living as a freelance writer and broadcaster.
Mac’s surrogate father in the 1930s was his uncle Lewis. Indeed, Lewis became a far more potent role-model for him, and later for me, than was his father Basil. Although Mac remembered Basil with love and respect, his memories were tarnished by the horrors of the last years, and of financial ruin. Basil was also a domesticated body, a man of the pavements. Mac’s imagination had become fixed on the wide-open spaces. He wanted adventure, and his uncle was its embodiment. Lewis stood six foot two, and was broad to match, a leonine figure with flowing hair and military moustache, in all respects larger than life. He was forever bursting with ideas and enthusiasms. Having relished the war, he set about securing a livelihood. In 1920 he married a Scottish heiress named Marigold Edmondstone, whom he met while recuperating in a military hospital from the after-effects of a bad trench gassing. Marigold was divorced, an unusual condition in grand families of the time. C.S. Forester’s General Sir Herbert Curzon, meeting his future wife for the first time, was struck by a sudden thought that her features resembled those of Bingo, ‘the best polo pony he ever had’. This seemed to me true of Marigold when I met her in later years, but I doubt whether Lewis bothered to look much at her face. Her fortune kept him in some style for the rest of his life, and her earlier mis-hit at marriage was a matter of indifference to him.
Uncharacteristically bitchy family gossip, broadcast by grandmother Billie and my aunt Beryl, held that Lewis never bothered to divorce his first wife, Clare – acquired and discarded in South Africa with equal insouciance around 1911–12, and recalled by his sister-in-law in shameless period vernacular as having ‘a touch of the tarbrush’ – before marrying Marigold. Such a solecism would certainly have accorded with his ruthless, reckless character. The notion of Lewis as a bigamist caused some later family amusement. Both Marigold and her son Stephen – who became Sir Stephen Hastings, MP – were keenly conscious of pedigree. Marigold recoiled from the vulgarity of Basil and family, especially his wife Billie. Class, class, class reared its head in the Hastings family as often as it does everywhere in British life. Billie was a woman of exceptional good nature, who endured her tribulations without bitterness. But she extracted from Mac a promise that he would never be nice to Marigold, because this queen of the hunting field was so damnably condescending to her. I always wonder why Lewis gave no financial help to Basil in the desperate circumstances of his brother’s last months. Either the two were no longer close, or Marigold held the purse strings too tightly. In any event, the gulf between the financial circumstances of Basil’s widow in her little West London flat and those of Lewis’s family in a succession of manor houses obviously exacerbated tensions between them.
Having secured Marigold’s hand and fortune, and thereafter produced two children with her, Lewis resumed his old roaming habits. He acquired a tobacco farm in Southern Rhodesia, and spent many of the interwar years there, leaving his offspring and often his wife to amuse themselves as they saw fit. He published a slim volume of poetry, became first president of the Tobacco-Growers’ Association, a member of the Rhodesian parliament and eventually of its cabinet, and indulged a lifestyle that would have commanded the respect of Kenya’s Happy Valley set. The novelist Doris Lessing, who grew up in Rhodesia, encountered Lewis when she was a gawky teenage girl. In her memoirs she left a pen-portrait of him, as MP for Lomagundi in the 1930s, which has always delighted me.
He was famous for his oratory. He was famous for his love affairs, possibly because he wrote poems not unlike Rupert Brooke’s, and a good many were love poems. Very handsome he was, like a lion. He was a dandy, with a suggestion of military swagger, but this was used for dramatic effect. He would stand at ease on his box platform and entertain the farmers and their wives and their children with speeches…garnished with Latin and Greek. The crowd stood about in the red dust, the men in their khaki, the women in their best dresses, the children behind him on the verandah, while the ox wagons went groaning past on their way to the railway tracks, and Major Hastings said – he was talking about Native Policy, but don’t imagine that he disapproved, ‘Volenti non fit injuria – which means, as of course you all know, “No harm is done to him who consents.”’ And everyone laughed…Major Hastings loved his audiences too much to despise them…[He] did it all with just a touch of parody, his smile inviting us all to share with him his style, his bravura. How could wives not fall in love with him? Not to mention daughters. There are men who – with not so much as one second’s impropriety, with no more than a look – perhaps without even intending it, promise a half-grown girl that one day she, too, will be a member of the freemasonry of love.
Lewis blew into London at irregular intervals, towering over the bar of the Savage Club as he captivated Mac with his tales of shooting elephant and lion, of camps in the bush under the stars. A passionate nationalist, pillar of the Empire Society, he foresaw a splendid future for East and Southern Africa, producing food for Britain – this, though his own agricultural ventures in Rhodesia were wholly unprofitable. Lewis’s personal behaviour, not least towards the wife whom he exploited without scruple, may not deserve admiration. The violence of his enthusiasms and enmities could alarm more temperate folk. But he was no line-shooter. He lived as he talked – physically fearless and bent upon draining every cup to the dregs. His son Stephen, who found it hard to relate to him, wrote: ‘He strode in and out of our lives like a whirlwind. As well as weaver birds’ nests he brought exhilaration, suspense and uncertainty. His was a life of stirring and haphazard adventure.’ In Rhodesia in 1973, I met an old Afrikaner who had farmed next door to Lewis forty years earlier. ‘Ach, I never forget Major Hastings,’ he said, in the inimitable accents of the veldt. ‘I used to see him go out to hunt in the morning with his rifle, wearing only a cartridge belt
