courtesy of Marigold’s money, in England Lewis was able to hunt, fish salmon, shoot pheasants and inhabit country houses appropriate to his acquired status as a country gentleman. His writings and later broadcasting made him modestly well known, but I doubt whether his earnings would have paid his cook’s salary. Lewis didn’t care. He believed that life was for living. Mac spent time with him whenever he could. In 1933 they drove to Germany together, to take a first-hand look at Nazism. Irked by hearing constant renditions of ‘The Horst Wessel Song’, at the famous Femina nightclub in Berlin Lewis insisted upon leading a rousing chorus first of the Cape Mounted Police song, then of ‘The Red Flag’, to the stunned horror of Brownshirts in the audience.
I still possess his heavily annotated copy of the English edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Lewis did not doubt for a moment that it would soon be necessary to fight Hitler. Although approaching sixty in the 1930s, he looked forward eagerly to a second round with the Hun. Meanwhile, Africa remained his happy hunting ground, its peoples his favourite companions. He wrote: ‘When I think of the African it is not as a kind of raw material for sociological experiment, but instead as clear-cut individuals, like Chidota my devoted and ruthless camp boss; Mafuta the dandy; Chiunda the tracker, and my old fighting Swazi and superb ox-driver Hendrik. I remember their separate ways and tricks and quite unquenchable laughter.’
In Rhodesia he kept a cheetah about the house: ‘Zunzu was often a bit of a trial to human visitors. To have a great animal suddenly leap in through the bathroom window was a test of character.’ One overnight guest objected strongly to discovering on awakening what he described as ‘a tiger sitting in my suitcase’. Lewis read a great deal, especially poetry. But he believed that excessive attention to intellectual pursuits dulled the physical senses, which grew more intense if denied books and newspapers. ‘You hear more – you see more things, you see more of them and you see further. That heightened sensibility to external impressions which shepherds have, and gamekeepers and gardeners and hunters – that’s one of the chief rewards. Awareness of movement and growth and seasonable signs, of footprints in the dust, of wind and the stars – these are the things that are blunted by books.’
Although nominally farming in Rhodesia, Lewis contrived to spend many weeks hunting in Mozambique and the Okavango Delta in Bechuanaland, as well as shooting lion and leopard closer to home. For years he was accompanied by his camp boss, Mafuta, a wartime veteran of the King’s African Rifles, ‘who could throw as pretty a salute as any Grenadier. If I hadn’t gone out with my gun-bearer at first light, Mafuta would materialise somehow out of the bush, stand rigidly at attention and deliver himself in his official voice somewhat as follows: “Good morning, n’kosi. Klass has cleaned the shotgun and gone out to get some guinea fowl. The elephants went over the river into the reed-bed last night. The n’tombi has come from the village with some eggs. A hyena has come in the night and taken a buffalo hide. The sugar is finished.” So there you were – all the real news in headlines. But Mafuta always put the good news first and the bad last, which is a much better idea than the one current in Fleet Street.’
One day when Lewis was out on a long trek, at evening he went out alone with a shotgun, in search of an antelope for the pot. After walking for some time, there was a sudden eruption in the bush in front of him. A bushbuck sprang out, he took a long-range snap shot, and was delighted to see the beast drop, apparently stone dead. Leaning his gun against a tree, Lewis walked forward to collect the carcass.
The moment I bent down to handle him, he came to life. I threw myself down, and grabbed him by the throat. The next second his razor-sharp hooves cut clean through my belt, just missing the skin. Many and many a time I had handled calves for branding, but this thing was like a bundle of steel springs. I twisted my legs round him and bore down as hard as I could. My weight at that time was 190 pounds, the bushbuck’s no more than ninety, but it took everything I had to hang on and prevent his hooves ripping me in pieces. At last I managed to shift my grip from the throat to his horns, and with that additional leverage I wriggled him round underneath me until I could reach my knife, and open it with my teeth. All this time the buck was blowing foam in my face, his tongue was lolling out of the corner of his mouth, and he was making the fiercest kind of ram noises. But I got him where I wanted him in the end, drove the knife in and cut his windpipe. For quite some little time I sat down after this struggle covered with blood, mostly the buck’s. Then I tore my tattered shirt into strips, and fastened the antelope’s legs together. I draped the heavy body over my shoulders and started back for the camp. The buck seemed a great deal more than ninety pounds by the time I got there.
At their best, Lewis’s descriptions of his life in the bush achieved a lyricism not unworthy of being compared with those of Karen Blixen or Robert Ruark: ‘The dawn breaks on the wide plain of tawny grass and the scattered clumps of tall ivory palm. It is the air and light and visible world of the First Day, virginal and unblemished…Far ahead of you there are some glittering motes of light that suddenly resolve themselves into a group of impala, most beautiful of all antelope. At long range they dance like snowflakes and are almost as effervescent.’ Mac was intensely impressionable, and Lewis conveyed to his nephew a sense of the romance of Africa which never faded. Less usefully, he also imbued him with some of his own contempt for the practical issues of life, solvency among them. Lewis’s values were those of Buchan and Sapper, which were starting to seem dated even in the 1930s. He never made the most of his considerable talents, because chronic restlessness caused him to go walkabout before finishing anything he started.
The most notable influence on Mac’s life, in the last phase before war came, was a woman. He struck up a friendship with a successful gentleman dentist named Bertie Pallant, who continued to practise despite having a country estate and considerable fortune. Bertie eventually squandered his money in a series of increasingly fanciful investments, but in those days plenty of cash remained. His rural acres lay in Sussex, south of Haslemere, and he was a keen shooter and fisher. Mac yearned to adopt these pursuits, but lacked experience, opportunities and cash. Now he began to edge into the rural world, and to explore a path to its pleasures. In 1938, for £50 he rented a cottage and rough shooting rights in Vernley Wood, a few miles from the Pallants’ place, and acquired an uncontrollable black spaniel which he christened Ruins, because the puppy was born in the old castle at Cowdray. A keeper looked after the dog while Mac was off earning a living.
Bertie Pallant had a smart, stunningly beautiful wife named Ruth, possessed of infinite Irish charm and considerable Irish recklessness. She and Mac embarked upon an affair which persisted for some years. Bertie was apparently acquiescent, for the three often went shooting and fishing together. Ruth sized up Mac, and decided that his years working at Lyons had given him some sorely mistaken ideas about what constituted the high life. She set about purging his vulgarities, and transforming him into a gentleman. With the aid of Savile Row and Ruth’s generosity, his wardrobe dramatically improved. He acquired his first made-to-measure shotgun, along with an impressive array of sporting impedimenta. He discovered that the Trocadero did not, as he had supposed, represent the summit of sophistication. Years later Ruth, who became my godmother, told me without embarrassment that she regarded herself as the architect of the new-model Macdonald Hastings. The phrase ‘make-over’ had not then been invented, but that is what she imposed upon Mac. It had only one unfortunate consequence. Forever afterwards, he sustained a style of living without much attempt to reconcile this with his income. Ruth turned Mac into a dashing country-gentleman-about-town, lacking acres and cash to support his enthusiasms. This would lead to many tears before bedtime, mostly shed by Mac’s wives.
Yet his career was taking off. In December 1938, a few months before the outbreak of war, he achieved the highest ambition of many of his generation of journalists: at the age of twenty-nine, he was given a job on the new weekly magazine sensation, Picture Post. Created and edited by the Hungarian Jewish refugee Stefan Lorant, it burst upon Britain with a force only matched, a decade later, by the coming of television. Indeed, with its bold use of live-action photographs, its elevation of the 35mm Leica camera to an instrument of magic arts, it represented the last old-media print revolution before moving images seized the ascendant.
