in close partnership with a photographer, he adapted readily to the discipline. At the outset, he specialised in country topics. Then as now, journalists were an overwhelmingly urban breed, knowing little about rural life. This offered notable opportunities to a writer stricken with a romantic enthusiasm for the English countryside, such as Mac. There were more people who wanted to read about rural life than there were journalists capable of satisfying the demand. Political correctness being unheard of, Mac contributed big pieces to early issues of Picture Post on pheasant-shooting, badger-digging and otterhunting, as well as British farming, the life of a tramp, the work of vets. When King George VI paid a state visit to Canada, Mac was given a wonderfully glamorous transatlantic assignment. With a photographer he travelled to New York on the Queen Mary, recording the passage, then wrote two features on the city before travelling north into Canada. The King and Queen had just crossed the continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mac was sent to trace the same journey, and describe what the King saw.
Afterwards, he travelled to the far north to write about life in the Yukon, visited a logging camp in British Columbia and the wheat prairies of Alberta, before catching the boat back to England. Back home, he persuaded the magazine to let him do a feature about buying a pair of handmade shotguns from Robert Churchill – though I doubt whether the £240 which he paid for them was chargeable to expenses. By the autumn of 1939, still just short of thirty, he had established himself as one of the young stars of Picture Post. The fears and sorrows of his teens were behind him. Journalism is more generous than any other career to successful young practitioners, offering not only a living, but almost unlimited opportunities for fun and adventure. Avidly, Mac set about exploring them.
My mother disliked her own family considerably. No photographs of them were visible in any house in which we later lived. She spoke dismissively of their professional doings, and recalled with distaste the oppressive atmosphere in their home. Born in 1913, she was ‘frightened of my parents, and grew up too soon for Dr Spock. I caught the tail-end of the Victorian philosophy that parents were perfect, and children always in the wrong, a righteous target for round-the-clock criticism. This made me very shy in company.’ Her paternal grandfather was a Congregationalist minister, a heavy, bearded Victorian, named Rev. John Scott-James, who presided over a church in Stratford-on-Avon and somehow contrived to educate eight children with the aid of scholarships. One such enabled my own grandfather, Rolfe, born in 1880, to attend Mill Hill school and then read classics at Brasenose, Oxford. Most of his sisters spent their later lives as spinster teachers in far-flung corners of the world. One, like her Hastings contemporary, became a nun.
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